This week's blogging question is related to our upcoming class on
statistical literacy, but is also inspired by an NPR article on scorekeeping in baseball published a while ago. Alva
Noë's fine essay points out that although few fans today maintain the
old tradition of watching ball games with scoresheet and pencil in hand,
the practice should not be mistaken for dispassionate number-crunching.
Rather, close observation and recording of details -- combined with the
exercise of judgment about, say, whether or not a play constitutes an
error -- should be recognized as a different kind of engagement with the
game. As Noë suggests, attending to the myriad
details that make up a single play focuses the mind on the complexity of
the event in ways that simply watching and listening to the announcers
cannot. As Sherlock Holmes often points out to his
companions Watson and Lestrade, we see but we don't observe. The act of
recording the data generated by a baseball game, and especially of
counting and analyzing them, helps us to observe patterns and details we
might otherwise see but never comprehend. The same argument could be
made for quantitative methods in social research: counting, measuring,
and analyzing for statistical patterns can reveal dimensions of our
lived experience that aren't available to the observer any other way.
Supposedly Einstein had a sign on the wall of his office at Princeton that read "Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts." I believe this is true, but I also believe there are stories that can only numbers can tell. In Wednesday's class I'll tell the story of when I learned about gender differences in pay and promotion among the faculty at the university where I was doing my PhD. In that case, numbers told a story that contradicted the comfortable narrative about pay equity that I had just assumed to be true.
What are some of the significant things you've learned about the world that took the form of statistics? Are there any statistics that have similarly struck home with you, which you have perhaps found arresting or disquieting or illuminating? How were those stats derived from data? How were they communicated such that they'd have a human resonance beyond cold, abstract numbers? Another way to answer this question could be to share an example of a data visualization that you believe to be especially eloquent or insightful, such as the Minard flow map of Napoleon's march on Moscow, which I discussed in an earlier class.
And in case you were wondering, baseball season begins on April 3rd, just one month and ten days away...
Supposedly Einstein had a sign on the wall of his office at Princeton that read "Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts." I believe this is true, but I also believe there are stories that can only numbers can tell. In Wednesday's class I'll tell the story of when I learned about gender differences in pay and promotion among the faculty at the university where I was doing my PhD. In that case, numbers told a story that contradicted the comfortable narrative about pay equity that I had just assumed to be true.
What are some of the significant things you've learned about the world that took the form of statistics? Are there any statistics that have similarly struck home with you, which you have perhaps found arresting or disquieting or illuminating? How were those stats derived from data? How were they communicated such that they'd have a human resonance beyond cold, abstract numbers? Another way to answer this question could be to share an example of a data visualization that you believe to be especially eloquent or insightful, such as the Minard flow map of Napoleon's march on Moscow, which I discussed in an earlier class.
And in case you were wondering, baseball season begins on April 3rd, just one month and ten days away...
