Quantifacts
Reading across the web, gleaning information and surfing on various waves of information, you come across snippets of information that ring true, invite reflection, but are not necessarily connected to a body of knowledge you are investigating or pursuing in any focused way. I am interested in a wide variety of subjects that are sometimes barely connected and at others only evoke conceptual connections as a kind of bridge across epistemological divides.
It is a kind of associative journey; following key words into dark alleys which at times open up into bright vistas of new information territories. Sometimes treasures are found, keys to making sense of something you could not grasp or see, better explained by what seem irrelevant at first. We don’t always have time I’m afraid for this immersive process akin to immersion in a new culture when we travel and wander simply taking in the sights, sounds, while absorbing the feel of a place. Do I waste my time? BIG TIME. Do I feel guilty that I’m not doing what I’m suppose to be doing—like finishing my research report? Of course I do. But….
Below is one of these finds. A cultural anthropology view of statistical artifacts. I couldn’t resist. Like Blogjects explored earlier, Quantifacts is another neologism with character. Another discursive object with weight in our collective imagination. What follows only has an indirect link to education or even learning per se. The excerpt looks at how numbers commodify knowledge while transforming the nature of what is understood to be real.
Figuring Crime: Quantifacts and the Production of the Un/Real | Public Culture
[Statistics] Being assertions of the real, they fill the space between the unknowable and the axiomatic, imagination and anxiety. Viewed thus, the statistic is a medium of communication and a species of commodified knowledge, one whose value and veracity accumulates as it circulates. Part fetish, it has also become a term in the ordinary language of being.
The rise of contemporary Western perceptions of society, Ian Hacking (1990:1 – 5) has famously argued, was closely tied to the “avalanche of numbers” produced, publicized, and deployed for purposes of governance by nineteenth-century states (cf. Canguilhem 1989).
The obsession with counting and with calculating probability, he suggests, had profound epistemic effects. For one thing, “society” itself “became statistical.” For another, the appeal to lawlike regularities began to replace other kinds of causal explanation, such as “human nature,” in making sense of and acting upon the world.
On the micro level:
If lets say there is only a 10% chance that a child with some identified syndrome survives beyond the age of 5, what do you do? What can you do? If I am diagnosed with cancer and they give me 3 months or 3 years according to survival rates of my kind of cancer, what will I decide? What is the psychology of this false knowingness? Do I feel the urgency to live with 3 months left or do I give up and let myself die right then and there! Or even commit suicide! With three years I may decide to chuck it all or obsess compulsively on every symptom and die of a heart attack instead.
On a mezo and macro levels there are all kinds of predictive sciences : from epidemiology, to economics all sharing their ‘wisdom’ to navigate our living in the world. We are human and humans like to believe they have some control over the unknown. Our frail sense of trust in ‘natural’ living is shored up by a boulimic consumption of these charts and various predictive devices called expert knowledge. I`m not advocating going back to the bush and learning in the wild, but I am saying live a little and sense your way around, a knowingness that comes from within. You don’t know how many clients have sat in my office wanting to get a neat answer, a quick solution, a downloadable map of the journey, a prescription to kill the pain, a magic word to make it all right. What happened to tuning in? To living and sensing? to learning from what emerges in situ? to listening to feelings and knowledgeable sensations? We have lost this ancient wisdom and replaced it from without, making ourselves more vulnerable than ever.
Probabilities don’t predict, they are not facts but creative possibilities, dressed in numbers. The hegemonic ways in which numbers are used is an area worth studying much more closely. I’m thinking of Fairclough critical discourse analysis (capitalist discourse studies) but also of Joseph E.Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontent; a book I bought a year or so ago on the recommendation of my public policies professor but have yet to read. Stiglitz nobel prize lecture is found here where the politics of information meet economics (the science of quantified wants and needs!). Stiglitz calls this meeting of models and lived facts : imperfect information. Sounds like human creativity or Qualifacts is my books.
