Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
An analysis
It has oft been noted that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Our goal, then, should be to start to open people up to the possibility that all their learning, their life of experience, is only a small fraction of the valid range of humanity.
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It is common to label acts as 'inhumane' but what does this mean?
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The most obvious perpetrators of so-called inhumane acts are warlords and despots, but these people are still apparently humans.
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Presidents and business people also get the tacked on disparagement of 'just not caring'.
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It is, I suppose, possible that we are actually two races instead of one. Genetic twins that break down into sweet, contemplative, always nice, always respectful People, and rude, immodest, sexually deviant, and hateful Monsters.
In the spirit of Occam we will dismiss this possibility for the moment but we may have time to come back to it...
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Sufficiently, human beings' capacity for understanding other human beings is, shall we say, limited?
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One of our methods for overcoming this deficit, one of our most successful as it turns out. Is by gathering information on demographics and modeling human behaviors with math. The art of statistical analysis:
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A statistical model, for those of you in the cheap seats, is anything that is useful for describing an actual physical reality. Not generally thought of statistical models but technically so are physics and other science equations. Supply and demand is a rather famous inverse correlation (look it up), and then there's the liar's choice, the apparent homogony of experience inherent to the bell curve.
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Without delving too much into complexity or strange attractors people who use the bell curve in its unadulterated form are going to burn in a very special kind of hell. What is important is that I recently watched a youtube video of some random mathematician trying desperately to force a proof that things along the outlier sides of the curve simply do not happen. Their arguments did not compel me, I've seen the Earth, I've done the math.
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Just to blow your mind, for a second. People always talk about how there must be life somewhere else out the in the universe. This is demonstrably unlikely. If Earth is average then their should be statistical outlier species, it took us 5 billion years to evolve on one little planet in one little galaxy. If the mean is 5 billion then that means there should be tons of us because that's already about half the length of the life of the universe as it is currently calculated today. If average is common, why are we alone? There is a going theory stating that the universe is too big to see eachother yet but, well, did I mention the moving goalposts?
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But why do these statistical methods fail? Why is it possible one set of people to look at a set of numbers and reach one conclusion, and another set of people look at the same numbers and reach a completely different conclusion?!
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Without delving too much into how people talk past eachother, with the help of their preferred ideologies. This problem is the result of deconstruction. That is: data's natural tendency to degrade over time.
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Some thought has gone into describing the nature of how deconstructing works but it is all bunk, suffice to say, entropy is considered to be constant and people who talk about overcoming misunderstandings are considered naive and their tactics are considered unstable and dangerous.
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It would be fine if people took this on board and, for instance, decided to treat people who act differently than them with actual respect. Respect that makes space for a new behavior rather than expecting return to some kind of 'normalcy'. This is literally the old person sin, and they're making old people younger these days...
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So where does statistics fit into all this? Say you wanted to know the number of roses in your garden, and then say you wanted to compare the number of roses to the number of other flowers, such as daisies and daffodils (I don't know why, just say you are very anal about flower arranging...). So you count up all your daisies, daffodils, and other flowers and you learn that you have forty roses and also one... rose-like thing. I mean, it's not a rose you've seen before but it looks like a rose, it smells like a rose, and so, logic goes, it must be a rose.
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This demonstrates logic's endless ability to move the goalposts according to a repressed feeling. What's important is not what our definition of what a rose was, but what we feel a rose is now.
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Thinking types do this endlessly and then put the blame solely on the shoulders of the long suffering feeling types who, in goodwill, put up with this eventually expecting the unfeeling thinker to validate them as well.
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Feeling types then adopt these ideological statements and internalize them according to the logical structure they've been told they have to adopt, hence the thousands of introverted feelers on the internet desperately trying to justify their own particular brand of worldview.
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In reality, and we will address Jung's therapy again for a moment, feeling and thinking are universal traits that sometimes lead us to be extroverted and sometimes lean into isolation and introversion. There is not type of human that does not think or feel, we are all doing these things all the time in different level's relative to eachother (remember Einstein?).
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So how does statistics deal with this uncertainty? In short, it doesn't. At least if the scandalous scientific digests that flood my for you page daily are any indication.
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What statistics has made clear is the future of statistics.
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In information analysis the goal is not to reach forgone conclusions, that is, things which we pretend we are not already looking for in the data. It is to study how we see certain things as other things and why new things arise in the first place.
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This may yet prove to be a fool's errand for long term growth but it's the best way, as far as I can tell, to combat people's absolute faith in statistical modeling.
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Facebook, again, is already trying to dim all the data. What that means for us is that we have a direct competitor. And, while Facebook does tend to err in a very lateral direction, their coverage is such that they hit more deep points more often than I do. I mean, I'm just one psychosocial worker...
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So the inmates are running the asylum, but what would I do any different? How am I any different.
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Without going into too much detail on my mom or the nature of Ni. I have lived experience. That is, I have a model for good living that is qualitative not ideological. It just comes to me naturally as intuitions. Or, if you'd rather, I can feel the Force.
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The difference between Bird and Mark is that I went to some trouble to fix my life and Mark is several leagues down a hole of his own ideological design. Good living takes good honest work and it's hard to stay honest when you have all the advantages of a billionaire.
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Truly, I have no idea what I would do with the money if you guys gave it to me. Probably build a body or something...
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I don't really want to take control of the situation. I just want everyone else to admit that they have not got the control they think they do and to start the long process of finding prosocial investments (bodies are probably not very prosocial while we still have wars, see I'm no better than anyone else!).
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This is all very touching but what about the information theory? How can we even begin to identify with math the problems of understanding things according to math?
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Well, without giving too much away, ratios are going to be a very big deal. Measuring the point under a curve between the kind of demographic a person is perceived as vs their subjective experience (the difference between the height of the x axis of a bell curve and the lower bound x axis on the same curve... I can draw it out for you later if you're really curious).
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Such a strange little meta-statistic might be useless but it also might have infinite use to the lived perceptions of a psychosocial worker.
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That seems like enough for today. As always if you need to reach me:
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~Bird
