Do Quants Destroy?

Aaron Brown, wrote a review on Scott Patterson's book, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It . Review in QuantNetwork .

Part of the Summary:

Not every quant idea proves to be good. Putting numbers on a good idea makes it more precise, testable, actionable and improvable. Putting numbers on a bad idea makes it more impressive, powerful, dangerous and opaque to non-quants.

I add: provided the numbers are interpretable ant testable across verified lines (you have orthogonalized your instruments-models-methods-implementations).