Cootner attacked Mandelbrot's "messianic tone" and expressed his discomfort with what he said was Mandelbrot's "disturbingly casual" use of evidence, noting that much of the evidence was "graphical and involves slopes of lines which are not given precise numerical values" (Cootner 1964, p. 333). Cootner marshaled his own evidence against the Levy hypothesis, and ended with an impassioned plea to consider the possible costs (the "loss functions," as he put it) involved in the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis: Mandelbrot, like Prime Minister Churchill before him, promises us not utopia but blood, sweat, toil, and tears.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 504