Last night on the national news for Canada (yeah you guessed it, I'm Canadian.... so Canadian issues will probably be explored more than others.... I will still try to make it more universal in issues covered despite local examples.... hope I succeed). Anyway, back to my subject: the news explained that the latest statistics showed Canada working harder than most industrialized nations and yet had declined some more in productivity. According to the news report, Canada has been declining in productivity since the 1990s. Well, I am not a fan of statistics because we have turned this useful tool called statistics and transformed it into an oracle to replace the one at Delphi, but when the oracle says something I have already noticed and mentioned, I point it out to others.... not because I want to give it any more credibility than it already has but because for many people, the oracle is the only thing they will listen to.
Now the statistics don't explain why the figures are the way they are, and that is its biggest weakness, but they do take a basic snapshot of life and from there we can see certain things we may not have been able to see with the naked eye. We say that a photograph does not lie, and as such if statistics is a type of photograph then we can presume that the statistics do not lie. As any photographer will tell you though, one can manipulate the lighting of the area, one can decide a more favorable angle of the subject to be photographed, one can decide to zoom in and focus on an unpleasant section and other techniques or filters can be used which can then manipulate emotionally the viewer of the photograph. Statistics is not all that different, there are ways to arrange the figures to manipulate the reader emotionally to accept some view or other. So we should always be cautious with any image we see and not assume that it is truth, but only an illusion of the truth to better understand what is actually there, like a map is not the location, but only its representative--> its an illusion of the real area; a facsimile.
These figures do not give the reason why our workforce is declining in productivity, just like if you photograph a man walking towards the left of the image, you do not know why he is going in that direction nor do you know why. Well if we can understand statistics in the same way as a photo, we can proceed to use it as what it is: a useful tool, not THE ONLY TOOL available. My blogs of last week offers an interpretation of why we are declining in productivity, but some of us are still like ostriches and have our heads buried in the sand and will not wish to do anything unless the oracle we call statistics tells them what is going on. So I mention these statistics in case some of my readers are ostriches and don't believe what is in front of everyone else's eyes. But I do mention the statistics with the warning: they are like photos, they are not reality.
I once attended a seminar that claimed it was going to explain why people voted the way they did during the last federal elections. I was curious to see if their reasons were similar to my own (not that I am going to mention them in this particular blog). I was severely disapointed, because they spent the entire time producing statistics from 3 different research groups as to what happened. How many women voted this way or that, how the age groups differed in their votes, how the economic lifestyles voted compared to those richer or poorer. If I really wanted to know such things, I just had to pick up a local newspaper who had reported the cold lifeless statistics. No one there could offer any reasons as to why the people voted in such unprecedented ways, the experts were all dumbfounded and claimed that they could not see this coming. Excuse me? Could not see this coming? Maybe had they spent less time studying previous photographs (statistics) and spoke to the subjects of the photographs (hanging out with people) they would not have been so surprised... Of course, an amount of thinking is also necessary.
Imagine that you have a horse race, and you see horse #4 win the race; a group of experts tell you that they will present a seminar to explain why horse #4 has won the race. You show up, because you spent some time with all the horses and you spoke with the trainers and you saw their diet and you calculated that horse #4 would probably win based upon contemplation and life experiences; so you want to see how close your assumptions are compared to the experts who are supposed to know things. The entire time is spent with the experts showing photographs of horse #4 passing through the finish line, a close-up photograph of the horse's right foot as he passes the finish line, a wide angled shot of the horse near the middle of the race showing the wet track.... then when you think that they will now start explaining the why, another group of experts show more photographs taken by other photographers who had a different vantage point. In the end when you ask directly, the why of the winning, each expert shrugs his shoulders and offers possibilities based upon some of the photographs: "Perhaps the wet track for horse #4 made it easier for him to run?" Well that's the most you will ever get from statistics: just numbers.
If you use these numbers to make decisions for society and you use nothing else, then don't be surprised when disaster strikes. If you can glance at the numbers to remind you of the map of the wilderness you happen to be in and carry forward to the destination you already know you need to go (without the map), then you are using statistics properly, like one tool out of many in the toolbox of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment