13 ms·

The declining authority of statistics and the experts who analyse them

104 points by prmph 10y ago

basicplus2 10y ago
Not sure statistics ever "accurately" represented the world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  Yeah. The article makes a case that people have come to a newfound mistrust for statistics. But, that mistrust has been around for a very long time. A big part of the mistrust is not in the numbers themselves, but in the people who trot out the statistics and the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers Sometimes not so carefully. In a previous election, I remember seeing a purported screenshot from an evening news show that showed poll results, but skipped the #2 candidate entirely. Presumably they favored #1, and didn't want people to think there was a viable contender. This screenshot itself could have been faked, but we've seen other serious blunders by TV news, like the fabricated names of officers on a downed flight.
    - zigzigzag 10y ago
      A recent example I saw was a friend of mine on Facebook, who posted a snapshot from an MSNBC program. It was an attack on Rex Tillerson, in the form of a bar graph of profit potential for ExxonMobil by country. The countries seemed pretty random (that well known oil giant Germany was in there) but at the top was Russia with a bar far far larger than any other country on the chart. The graph was an obvious attempt to continue the theme of "Trump administration is owned by Russia". The problem was that the numbers next to each bar weren't labelled: the graph was totally lacking in context. I did some googling and found that the graph appeared to be measuring profit potential in millions of acres of drilling rights. Thus it was comparing an acre of frozen Arctic ocean with an acre of Germany as if they were the same thing. There are industry standard ways to compare oil fields. I've never once seen oil fields measured in this way because it ignores extraction costs, but sure, if you want to imply that Russia will be wildly more profitable than anywhere else on earth then that's one way to do it. But it's an abuse of statistics. I pointed this out to the friend in question who simply said that she had a policy of not taking part in political debates on Facebook.
lindig 10y ago
The article doesn't mention the problem that we often try to predict the outcome of a singular event when statistics can only tell us something about it when repeating it. The prediction could still be correct even when the actual event is not what was predicted.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  That, combined with the facts that humans have a poor intuition for probability and statistics and some results in the field seem inherently paradoxical (if you told a lay person that zero probability events happen all the time, they would look at you like you are crazy).
  - Retric 10y ago
    That's just confusing numbers that approach zero with zero. Much like how guessing the lotto number has really low odds, but guessing that their will be a number has very good odds.
    - gizmo686 10y ago
      Not quite. Pick a random real number in the range [0,1]. Because there are an infinite amount of such numbers, the probability of picking any specific real number is precisely 0. However, you will still end up picking some number. EDIT: Fixed range
      - nitrogen 10y ago
        Assuming you meant [0,1], I don't think it's accurate to describe infinitesimals like lim->0 as being equal to zero. Adding an infinite number of infinitesimals gives a nonzero result, but adding an infinite number of zeros does not.
      - mrob 10y ago
        Picking a random real number in the range [0,1] is impossible. The expected length of its simplest description is infinite, and if you cant describe it you haven't actually picked it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jordache 10y ago
Statistical analysis of poor data doesn't mean statistics is a poor method.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
conistonwater 10y ago
The weird thing is that there are statistics that are based basically on surveys, whose collection and analysis is essentially model- and assumption-free. Like the unemployment rate, or inflation, for example. And yet there are enough politicians who reject even those statistics, and that seems like a totally different category of stupidity. When that happens, it's hard to believe that the fault lies with the statisticians.
- darkxanthos 10y ago
  Wait what? Public opinion surveys (if that's what you meant) are absolutely still subject to error. This is especially due to getting a representative mix of all of the different populations. Even without those issues, you still have the issue of people you survey not telling the whole truth... or surveys being poorly designed so that the question people think they are answering is not what was really being asked. Data is hard. Just because you have some survey data and (maybe) did something statistical doesn't at all mean you should listen to it.
  - conistonwater 10y ago
    I think it's generally accepted that unemployment and inflation estimates are based on reliable techniques: what sorts of errors are you thinking of here? I mean, in principle, anything you do could be wrong (you can never reach absolute certainty), but you would always do better by trying to analyse things properly than by giving up. Edit: I didn't mean surveys in general, I meant the specific cases of unemployment and inflation, which to my mind are the two most prominent examples of people going crazy rejecting well-established facts.
    - ta_donk_gt 10y ago
      The right tends to prefer to reference labor participation rate, whereas the left tends to prefer unemployment rate. The reason for this is obvious: right now, unemployment rate advances the narrative of the left, and labor participation rate advances the narrative of the right. The argument from the right is that unemployment rate does not include the very large number of people who have given up searching for work (and have found some other way to survive, be it government assistance, or family, or charity, or illegal activities, etc.). This argues that the economy is actually in much worse shape than the unemployment rate would suggest. The argument from the left is that labor participation rate does not clearly indicate who really needs or wants to be working, only who is and is not working. This argues that the people out of the work force don't actually need to be in the workforce and therefore the economy is actually fine. If ever the unemployment rate works out better for the right, and labor participation rate better for the left, you will see the sides switch which metric they prefer to reference. That's how humans work. Calling those who don't subscribe to your preferred narrative "stupid" and "crazy" is probably not helpful.
apathy 10y ago
Reminder: the terms "statistics" and "statisticians" come from the common root word "statist". I am a trained, practicing statistician (clinical and medical, not governmental) and this always gives me pause. "Data science" is a shitty term, because science without data isn't science at all. Moreover, these days it's just long for "IT guy". But I'm not sure what's better as a term for the real thing, where experimental design and inference are as important as predictive accuracy in one specific context. Anyways. Statistics was always built around statism.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- severine 10y ago
  I'm not sure I get your point, care to elaborate?
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    He's wrong, that's not correct. In fact it comes from "state", statism is a term referring to the actions of a highly centralised government who handle economic planning and controls. "Statism" is a term that has been around since the 1850s, but "statistics" is a term coined by Gottfried Aschenwall in the late 1770s.
    - apathy 10y ago
      Well, I didn't claim to be a trained historian, which is probably the correct training for this type of work. Based on your temporal evidence, I must concede the point. However, I did not actually pull this straight out of my ass: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/statist http://www.thefreedictionary.com/statist Thanks for the history lesson (seriously). I learned from it.
  - openfuture 10y ago
    stat·ism ˈstādˌizəm/ noun noun: statism a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs. "the rise of authoritarian statism"
briantakita 10y ago
There's a 98.328% chance that statistics are used to deceive the consumers of the lossy compression of information.
general_ai 10y ago
The "statistics" is only in decline because it was blatantly used to try and sway the election. As in, oversampling demographics to get the necessary conclusion, phrasing the questions such that you're "literally Hitler" if you answer them "wrong" and so on. I quoted "statistics" because it's not statistics, it's pretty obvious propaganda, using the most shameless tricks in the book. Editors of Soviet Pravda would be proud. We know much of this thanks to Wikileaks now, as well as because it was so blindingly obvious that only a complete moron would think the polls were impartial. I'm not afraid of "what's next" because as far as political polling is concerned (calling it "statistics" is way too generous), it just can't really get any worse than it already is.
- explainthisth 10y ago
  Your comment is vague, but if you are talking about US election polls, they were 1-2% off in aggregate. That's a pretty good performance.
- gipp 10y ago
  The polls were no better or worse than past years. Reporting on the polls is a different story.
  - general_ai 10y ago
    Even the polls were cooked. E.g. to improve the odds of polls fitting the narrative, democratic leaning pollsters would disproportionately sample minorities known to vote predominantly democratic. The patron saint of pollsters, Nate Silver, was consistently wrong about everything all the way through the campaign. Now, if his main goal wasn't to peddle a particular narrative, one would expect him to make corrections to his models after getting things wrong, but no, he sacrificed his professional integrity instead. I'm sure this is not the first time this happened, but this year it was particularly obvious, and I don't really trust the polls at all anymore except when it comes to completely non-political topics.
    - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
afrancis 10y ago
A problem I found with article is the talk of opacity of statistics techniques in the guise of "big data" used in social media corporations. Statistics used by individuals and companies is nothing new. As a counter-example, I feel the public has greatly benefited from statistics in the form of quality management embedded in the proprietary processes of manufacturing and large service corporations. Stuff like TQM allow us to take for granted so many things. I think the issues revolve around who owns and gets access to large data sets, mathematical literacy and the morality/ethics of various players.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Perhaps from a moral perspective, statistics about inanimate matter like TQM are better than statistics about people? It's somewhat reminiscent of the Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, anyway.
lordnacho 10y ago
Is the problem that statistics are losing authority, or that everything connected with the elite is losing authority? From what I see, just about every class of experts is less trusted now than a few years ago. Economists, scientists (climate change), doctors (vaccines), and so on. Statistics are used to back up every quantitative thing that's ever been studied, so of course that quantitative element sometimes comes under scrutiny as well. As for statistics as a national health monitoring system, it is a victim of regime shift. You collect the statistics that seem relevant when you are setting up the collection. You look at things like money supply, unemployment, GDP and manufacturing jobs because they seem to make sense at the time. Whatever models people are working on seem to want those numbers, so those are the numbers you collect. Unfortunately, it's hard to model things for which you have no data. Social science is especially messy, and so there are many ways things might interact, but haven't yet, and some of those things will be a surprise to you, with the added problem that the confounding variable is one that you haven't collected, because you didn't think it was important. This regime shift, which causes a new way for the numbers to be generated, is to be expected. Why would the economy grow for hundreds of years, like it has, in the same way? Looking at history, it hasn't. The structure of the economy changes, as you would expect from any ecology that isn't in equilibrium. And "The World Economy" has been growing for hundreds of years. One example of numbers changing meanings was in the Economist the other day. Manufacturing is not what it was. A lot of builders of equipment now make money maintaining equipment or training people to use it. For instance I was surprised to find out a professional coffee making machine is actually not just a thing a coffee shop buys. They lease it, and along with the lease comes training for baristas. Something that would skew figures.
coldcode 10y ago
People often fail to trust what they don't understand, and instead believe those who offer easy to understand but often false or inaccurate information. People also look locally but are told things that apply globally and they can't connect the two. This of course means they are likely to be manipulated by people who know how to tailor the message. I don't know if our education system is up creating a population that can understand what they are being told and when they are being lied to. Life today is filled with so many decisions and concepts and information and connections and maybe it is too complex for most people to comprehend. This may just lead people to give up and never get beyond easy answers.
mjfl 10y ago
Statistics is not trusted because it shouldn't be. It is incredibly easy to lie with statistics. There's even a tutorial: https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728 https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03... Statistics is ultimately counting, and therefore is incredibly vulnerable to discretion in choosing "what counts". Take the unemployment rate as one example. When people realize that its not equivalent to "people who do not have a job", how can you complain that they trust statistics less? Expert authority is in decline because it should be, as there is an increasing body of evidence that experts, from politics to medicine, have almost no advantage in forecasting power than the average person. https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485036840&sr=1-1&keywords=expert+political+judgment https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... Why should "experts" (often just pundits) have any authority when they have consistently demonstrated they deserve very little? Finally, the political slant of this article, going along with the decried "fake news", blaming the election results on these declines in authority, is pathetic. It's basically an extension of "the other side is filled with stupids" and has no credibility, no matter how you dress it in professional journalistic veneer.
- amalcon 10y ago
  Most people who have recently been to a pro baseball game know that there are times to mistrust statistics. The home team likes to give attending fans something to look at during the long periods of relative downtime. For each hitter who comes up, they like to come up with a statistic that favors the home team to display on the screens. There are lots of options, so they can take their pick, even if they sometimes come up with things like "At-bats on a Tuesday against teams out-of-division". However, everyone who's trusted any technology that accounts for quantum effects (e.g. modern computer processors) has trusted statistics. Everyone who's ever received a modern medical treatment (of any kind) has trusted statistics. The hard part is knowing when you should, and when you should not, trust statistics. Frankly I don't think there's anyone who can do that 100% of the time -- but I think most people could probably learn to do well enough to benefit. The learning part is tough, though.
- psyklic 10y ago
eva1984 10y ago
Statistics never changes, what changes is the people who interprets them. So if there is anything to blame, elites should blame themselves because people don't want to believe their interpretation anymore.
milesf 10y ago
It's not that the authority of statistics is lost on me. What I don't trust is the reporting of statistical information without transparent access to the data and actual published results from knowledgeable statisticians. I think the solution is to push calculus off the K-12 agenda and up to the college/university level and replace it with probability and statistics instead. Most people understand averages, but they have no clue what standard deviation is. In fact (sad to say) many software developers don't even know what SD is! Until the general public are able to understand the power of numbers and their pragmatic use, people who know how to manipulate the masses will continue to do so.
Mendenhall 10y ago
Statistics is a useful metric, but how they are used and what they are trying to say while using them can often be very subjective. Example USA-someone is collecting unemployment, in December their unemployment money is up. They have no job, they want one and are looking. By government standards in January they are no longer unemployed, they are "not part of the work force" and ding! guess what unemployment rates just dropped because that person is no longer unemployed, awesome! Anyone interested in the reality of who is unemployed knows that statistic is full of bs. In December that person is looking and wants a job and is unemployed. In January that person is looking and wants a job and is unemployed. Stats changed but reality didnt.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Inflation statistics have the same problem. They typically don't include house, stock or bond prices. At best, they include some convoluted and highly questionable derivative of house prices like estimated rents. At worst houses don't affect the indexes at all. This leads to a situation where central bankers are publicly saying "hmmm, we've done massive QE but there's no inflation, what a mystery" whilst the average punter is seeing housing and stock market bubbles inflate right in front of his eyes. It causes people to tune out: headlines like "inflation statistics hit new low" are placed right next to "house prices reach record highs".
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
"...Is there a way out of this polarisation? Must we simply choose between a politics of facts and one of emotions, or is there another way of looking at this situation?..." I feel extremely uncomfortable being put in the position of supporting populist, right-wing causes simply because the essayist is doing such a bad job, but here we are. This author did a terrible job of understanding and explaining whatever the hell it was that they were trying to understand and explain. Perhaps "Populists hate science! How can we live with them?" Heck with it. I'm not going to take the other side. There are a half-dozen problems with how the argument is set up. Anybody with a passing familiarization with "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" should at least be able to set up a counter-argument or two. Statistical science is great. It's the foundation of much of the western economies. "Statistics", as that kind of numerical smorgasbord that's thrown around constantly in the media and politics where correlation and causation are the same? Not so much. If you can't see the difference, you really shouldn't be writing essays supposing to inform us on anything.

104 points by prmph 10y ago

Not sure statistics ever "accurately" represented the world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...

HillaryBriss 10y ago
Yeah. The article makes a case that people have come to a newfound mistrust for statistics. But, that mistrust has been around for a very long time. A big part of the mistrust is not in the numbers themselves, but in the people who trot out the statistics and the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers Sometimes not so carefully. In a previous election, I remember seeing a purported screenshot from an evening news show that showed poll results, but skipped the #2 candidate entirely. Presumably they favored #1, and didn't want people to think there was a viable contender. This screenshot itself could have been faked, but we've seen other serious blunders by TV news, like the fabricated names of officers on a downed flight.
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    A recent example I saw was a friend of mine on Facebook, who posted a snapshot from an MSNBC program. It was an attack on Rex Tillerson, in the form of a bar graph of profit potential for ExxonMobil by country. The countries seemed pretty random (that well known oil giant Germany was in there) but at the top was Russia with a bar far far larger than any other country on the chart. The graph was an obvious attempt to continue the theme of "Trump administration is owned by Russia". The problem was that the numbers next to each bar weren't labelled: the graph was totally lacking in context. I did some googling and found that the graph appeared to be measuring profit potential in millions of acres of drilling rights. Thus it was comparing an acre of frozen Arctic ocean with an acre of Germany as if they were the same thing. There are industry standard ways to compare oil fields. I've never once seen oil fields measured in this way because it ignores extraction costs, but sure, if you want to imply that Russia will be wildly more profitable than anywhere else on earth then that's one way to do it. But it's an abuse of statistics. I pointed this out to the friend in question who simply said that she had a policy of not taking part in political debates on Facebook.

lindig 10y ago

The article doesn't mention the problem that we often try to predict the outcome of a singular event when statistics can only tell us something about it when repeating it. The prediction could still be correct even when the actual event is not what was predicted.

tnecniv 10y ago
That, combined with the facts that humans have a poor intuition for probability and statistics and some results in the field seem inherently paradoxical (if you told a lay person that zero probability events happen all the time, they would look at you like you are crazy).
- Retric 10y ago
  That's just confusing numbers that approach zero with zero. Much like how guessing the lotto number has really low odds, but guessing that their will be a number has very good odds.
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    Not quite. Pick a random real number in the range [0,1]. Because there are an infinite amount of such numbers, the probability of picking any specific real number is precisely 0. However, you will still end up picking some number. EDIT: Fixed range
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      Assuming you meant [0,1], I don't think it's accurate to describe infinitesimals like lim->0 as being equal to zero. Adding an infinite number of infinitesimals gives a nonzero result, but adding an infinite number of zeros does not.
    - mrob 10y ago
      Picking a random real number in the range [0,1] is impossible. The expected length of its simplest description is infinite, and if you cant describe it you haven't actually picked it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jordache 10y ago

Statistical analysis of poor data doesn't mean statistics is a poor method.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

conistonwater 10y ago

The weird thing is that there are statistics that are based basically on surveys, whose collection and analysis is essentially model- and assumption-free. Like the unemployment rate, or inflation, for example. And yet there are enough politicians who reject even those statistics, and that seems like a totally different category of stupidity. When that happens, it's hard to believe that the fault lies with the statisticians.

darkxanthos 10y ago
Wait what? Public opinion surveys (if that's what you meant) are absolutely still subject to error. This is especially due to getting a representative mix of all of the different populations. Even without those issues, you still have the issue of people you survey not telling the whole truth... or surveys being poorly designed so that the question people think they are answering is not what was really being asked. Data is hard. Just because you have some survey data and (maybe) did something statistical doesn't at all mean you should listen to it.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  I think it's generally accepted that unemployment and inflation estimates are based on reliable techniques: what sorts of errors are you thinking of here? I mean, in principle, anything you do could be wrong (you can never reach absolute certainty), but you would always do better by trying to analyse things properly than by giving up. Edit: I didn't mean surveys in general, I meant the specific cases of unemployment and inflation, which to my mind are the two most prominent examples of people going crazy rejecting well-established facts.
  - ta_donk_gt 10y ago
    The right tends to prefer to reference labor participation rate, whereas the left tends to prefer unemployment rate. The reason for this is obvious: right now, unemployment rate advances the narrative of the left, and labor participation rate advances the narrative of the right. The argument from the right is that unemployment rate does not include the very large number of people who have given up searching for work (and have found some other way to survive, be it government assistance, or family, or charity, or illegal activities, etc.). This argues that the economy is actually in much worse shape than the unemployment rate would suggest. The argument from the left is that labor participation rate does not clearly indicate who really needs or wants to be working, only who is and is not working. This argues that the people out of the work force don't actually need to be in the workforce and therefore the economy is actually fine. If ever the unemployment rate works out better for the right, and labor participation rate better for the left, you will see the sides switch which metric they prefer to reference. That's how humans work. Calling those who don't subscribe to your preferred narrative "stupid" and "crazy" is probably not helpful.

apathy 10y ago

Reminder: the terms "statistics" and "statisticians" come from the common root word "statist". I am a trained, practicing statistician (clinical and medical, not governmental) and this always gives me pause. "Data science" is a shitty term, because science without data isn't science at all. Moreover, these days it's just long for "IT guy". But I'm not sure what's better as a term for the real thing, where experimental design and inference are as important as predictive accuracy in one specific context. Anyways. Statistics was always built around statism.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
severine 10y ago
I'm not sure I get your point, care to elaborate?
- chris_wot 10y ago
  He's wrong, that's not correct. In fact it comes from "state", statism is a term referring to the actions of a highly centralised government who handle economic planning and controls. "Statism" is a term that has been around since the 1850s, but "statistics" is a term coined by Gottfried Aschenwall in the late 1770s.
  - apathy 10y ago
    Well, I didn't claim to be a trained historian, which is probably the correct training for this type of work. Based on your temporal evidence, I must concede the point. However, I did not actually pull this straight out of my ass: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/statist http://www.thefreedictionary.com/statist Thanks for the history lesson (seriously). I learned from it.
- openfuture 10y ago
  stat·ism ˈstādˌizəm/ noun noun: statism a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs. "the rise of authoritarian statism"

briantakita 10y ago

There's a 98.328% chance that statistics are used to deceive the consumers of the lossy compression of information.

general_ai 10y ago

The "statistics" is only in decline because it was blatantly used to try and sway the election. As in, oversampling demographics to get the necessary conclusion, phrasing the questions such that you're "literally Hitler" if you answer them "wrong" and so on. I quoted "statistics" because it's not statistics, it's pretty obvious propaganda, using the most shameless tricks in the book. Editors of Soviet Pravda would be proud. We know much of this thanks to Wikileaks now, as well as because it was so blindingly obvious that only a complete moron would think the polls were impartial. I'm not afraid of "what's next" because as far as political polling is concerned (calling it "statistics" is way too generous), it just can't really get any worse than it already is.

explainthisth 10y ago
Your comment is vague, but if you are talking about US election polls, they were 1-2% off in aggregate. That's a pretty good performance.
gipp 10y ago
The polls were no better or worse than past years. Reporting on the polls is a different story.
- general_ai 10y ago
  Even the polls were cooked. E.g. to improve the odds of polls fitting the narrative, democratic leaning pollsters would disproportionately sample minorities known to vote predominantly democratic. The patron saint of pollsters, Nate Silver, was consistently wrong about everything all the way through the campaign. Now, if his main goal wasn't to peddle a particular narrative, one would expect him to make corrections to his models after getting things wrong, but no, he sacrificed his professional integrity instead. I'm sure this is not the first time this happened, but this year it was particularly obvious, and I don't really trust the polls at all anymore except when it comes to completely non-political topics.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago

afrancis 10y ago

A problem I found with article is the talk of opacity of statistics techniques in the guise of "big data" used in social media corporations. Statistics used by individuals and companies is nothing new. As a counter-example, I feel the public has greatly benefited from statistics in the form of quality management embedded in the proprietary processes of manufacturing and large service corporations. Stuff like TQM allow us to take for granted so many things. I think the issues revolve around who owns and gets access to large data sets, mathematical literacy and the morality/ethics of various players.

jessaustin 10y ago
Perhaps from a moral perspective, statistics about inanimate matter like TQM are better than statistics about people? It's somewhat reminiscent of the Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, anyway.

lordnacho 10y ago

Is the problem that statistics are losing authority, or that everything connected with the elite is losing authority? From what I see, just about every class of experts is less trusted now than a few years ago. Economists, scientists (climate change), doctors (vaccines), and so on. Statistics are used to back up every quantitative thing that's ever been studied, so of course that quantitative element sometimes comes under scrutiny as well. As for statistics as a national health monitoring system, it is a victim of regime shift. You collect the statistics that seem relevant when you are setting up the collection. You look at things like money supply, unemployment, GDP and manufacturing jobs because they seem to make sense at the time. Whatever models people are working on seem to want those numbers, so those are the numbers you collect. Unfortunately, it's hard to model things for which you have no data. Social science is especially messy, and so there are many ways things might interact, but haven't yet, and some of those things will be a surprise to you, with the added problem that the confounding variable is one that you haven't collected, because you didn't think it was important. This regime shift, which causes a new way for the numbers to be generated, is to be expected. Why would the economy grow for hundreds of years, like it has, in the same way? Looking at history, it hasn't. The structure of the economy changes, as you would expect from any ecology that isn't in equilibrium. And "The World Economy" has been growing for hundreds of years. One example of numbers changing meanings was in the Economist the other day. Manufacturing is not what it was. A lot of builders of equipment now make money maintaining equipment or training people to use it. For instance I was surprised to find out a professional coffee making machine is actually not just a thing a coffee shop buys. They lease it, and along with the lease comes training for baristas. Something that would skew figures.

coldcode 10y ago

People often fail to trust what they don't understand, and instead believe those who offer easy to understand but often false or inaccurate information. People also look locally but are told things that apply globally and they can't connect the two. This of course means they are likely to be manipulated by people who know how to tailor the message. I don't know if our education system is up creating a population that can understand what they are being told and when they are being lied to. Life today is filled with so many decisions and concepts and information and connections and maybe it is too complex for most people to comprehend. This may just lead people to give up and never get beyond easy answers.

mjfl 10y ago

Statistics is not trusted because it shouldn't be. It is incredibly easy to lie with statistics. There's even a tutorial: https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728 https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03... Statistics is ultimately counting, and therefore is incredibly vulnerable to discretion in choosing "what counts". Take the unemployment rate as one example. When people realize that its not equivalent to "people who do not have a job", how can you complain that they trust statistics less? Expert authority is in decline because it should be, as there is an increasing body of evidence that experts, from politics to medicine, have almost no advantage in forecasting power than the average person. https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485036840&sr=1-1&keywords=expert+political+judgment https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... Why should "experts" (often just pundits) have any authority when they have consistently demonstrated they deserve very little? Finally, the political slant of this article, going along with the decried "fake news", blaming the election results on these declines in authority, is pathetic. It's basically an extension of "the other side is filled with stupids" and has no credibility, no matter how you dress it in professional journalistic veneer.

amalcon 10y ago
Most people who have recently been to a pro baseball game know that there are times to mistrust statistics. The home team likes to give attending fans something to look at during the long periods of relative downtime. For each hitter who comes up, they like to come up with a statistic that favors the home team to display on the screens. There are lots of options, so they can take their pick, even if they sometimes come up with things like "At-bats on a Tuesday against teams out-of-division". However, everyone who's trusted any technology that accounts for quantum effects (e.g. modern computer processors) has trusted statistics. Everyone who's ever received a modern medical treatment (of any kind) has trusted statistics. The hard part is knowing when you should, and when you should not, trust statistics. Frankly I don't think there's anyone who can do that 100% of the time -- but I think most people could probably learn to do well enough to benefit. The learning part is tough, though.
psyklic 10y ago

eva1984 10y ago

Statistics never changes, what changes is the people who interprets them. So if there is anything to blame, elites should blame themselves because people don't want to believe their interpretation anymore.

milesf 10y ago

It's not that the authority of statistics is lost on me. What I don't trust is the reporting of statistical information without transparent access to the data and actual published results from knowledgeable statisticians. I think the solution is to push calculus off the K-12 agenda and up to the college/university level and replace it with probability and statistics instead. Most people understand averages, but they have no clue what standard deviation is. In fact (sad to say) many software developers don't even know what SD is! Until the general public are able to understand the power of numbers and their pragmatic use, people who know how to manipulate the masses will continue to do so.

Mendenhall 10y ago

Statistics is a useful metric, but how they are used and what they are trying to say while using them can often be very subjective. Example USA-someone is collecting unemployment, in December their unemployment money is up. They have no job, they want one and are looking. By government standards in January they are no longer unemployed, they are "not part of the work force" and ding! guess what unemployment rates just dropped because that person is no longer unemployed, awesome! Anyone interested in the reality of who is unemployed knows that statistic is full of bs. In December that person is looking and wants a job and is unemployed. In January that person is looking and wants a job and is unemployed. Stats changed but reality didnt.

zigzigzag 10y ago
Inflation statistics have the same problem. They typically don't include house, stock or bond prices. At best, they include some convoluted and highly questionable derivative of house prices like estimated rents. At worst houses don't affect the indexes at all. This leads to a situation where central bankers are publicly saying "hmmm, we've done massive QE but there's no inflation, what a mystery" whilst the average punter is seeing housing and stock market bubbles inflate right in front of his eyes. It causes people to tune out: headlines like "inflation statistics hit new low" are placed right next to "house prices reach record highs".

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

"...Is there a way out of this polarisation? Must we simply choose between a politics of facts and one of emotions, or is there another way of looking at this situation?..." I feel extremely uncomfortable being put in the position of supporting populist, right-wing causes simply because the essayist is doing such a bad job, but here we are. This author did a terrible job of understanding and explaining whatever the hell it was that they were trying to understand and explain. Perhaps "Populists hate science! How can we live with them?" Heck with it. I'm not going to take the other side. There are a half-dozen problems with how the argument is set up. Anybody with a passing familiarization with "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" should at least be able to set up a counter-argument or two. Statistical science is great. It's the foundation of much of the western economies. "Statistics", as that kind of numerical smorgasbord that's thrown around constantly in the media and politics where correlation and causation are the same? Not so much. If you can't see the difference, you really shouldn't be writing essays supposing to inform us on anything.