It's kind of lengthy, but I'd appreciate if you read it. Please don't be too harsh, but I would appreciate feedback. (and don't judge me on my spelling errors- i'm horrible with spelling and grammar, and this is a speech anyways.) "Before we start I would like to take some time to tell you about myself My GPA is 3.6 that tells you how smart and ambitious I am. Last year I gave over $300 to charity that tells you how kind and generous I am. This season my team brought home over 80 trophies and that is supposed to tell you how good at this I’m supposed to be And I also weigh 112 pounds that tells you beautiful and attractive I am. this is way we choose to view a majority of the world around us (in measurements fractions and statistics) All because, our society is based on numbers, numbers are considered the basis of all understandable reason, they tell what is true, who we are, design fact, logic and tell us everything that is real; because the Exceptional and possibly tragic thing about numbers is that they can be, inarguably, applied to everything. From how long the average fingernail grows in a week, to how good of a person Im. All together it brings up a point Maybe me and the world are little more complex than our transcripts show us to be. But why is our culture and our society this way. Why do we put such an emphasis on numbers to define and solve the world around us, when there are so many other factors? According to Sociologist Edward T. Hall we live in a low context culture “A high context culture is one in which people, are communal, think according to common good, work together, see the world in terms of symbols are concepts, and solve problems more with emotion than logic.” Very different from low context cultures like the United States which…“people rely on literacy and rationality rather than cooperation, see Linear Logic as the only road to reality, use primarily mathematic models to explain nature and the environment, are highly individualistic, and live more and more like machines.” But why would I even be talking about a little thing like numbers? And I say because this little thing is affecting us, society, individuals, everyone, in a big way. The overuse of numbers has made us lose sight of what’s important and has shifted the way we live our lives in a negative way. how many times have you heard a statistic and questioned it as only a possibility. If I said to you “85% of all migrant farm workers are obsessed with prom queens and apple sauce” you would have no choice but to believe me. The problem with statistics is that weather true or not they are too concrete, simple, and impersonal to be open to human questioning. Because of this they have become a near religion or dogma for telling what is fact and reality. And we willingly follow it. Because due to our high culture society, we are too individualized to care about perspective, creativity, feeling, meaning, moral guidance or all the other modes humans use to solve problems. The simplicity of statistics and their ability to be applied to any thing has unearthed a whole array of problems. In our pursuit to logically and numerically solve all earths’ mysteries, we’ve become “number happy” Making things simple even if they are complicated and measuring things even if they are immeasurable. Just like Andrea Borden who in 1998 decided to make an excel spread sheet entitled “my love life: a ten year span” to this impersonal scientific expression of her love life she concluded that… “It was actually kind of reassuring. When you reduce people to just numbers everything that was painful about your relationship with them just vanishes, the person who kissed you and never called you again, the really embarrassing person you’d rather just forget ever happened; is all gone, all the pain, just gone.” This is what happens when you apply numbers to immeasurable things, you forget, you forget what’s important, and worst you forget how to feel. Maybe their called numbers because they make you numb to life? Numbers may be easier than pain, but theirs a reason we feel pain; it’s important, because pain is life. How many times have you cried after hearing a 12 million people died in holocaust? Its hard isn’t it to process all that life being lost. Well it’s no wonder according to physiologist George A. Millar… The human mind can only grasp up to 9 things at a time. So asking someone to handle the significance of even 30 lives lost is daunting. What’s worse is that we even dare apply a simple digit to such a mysteriously complicated emotionally beautiful truly tragic concept as death. I can’t imagine anything more disrespectful than to take the whole longevity and significance of a person’s life and squashing it in to one single unnamed indefinable unit as if it dose not matter. Shouldn’t we care more about who died than how many? The bi product of these things is that when we hear about 400,000 people have died in the Sudan so far, we may muster enough to say it is sad but: the numbers mask our mind from seeing the true implications and block our emotions, sympathy, love, and tears from ever reveling them selves. And something’s wrong with that. Another problem with this, Is we use statistics to exemplify popular human institutions and opinion. Even though the wide array of human patterns and views are immeasurable simply based on how different we are: we could never have a controlled variable. These statistics create a hierarchy of American thought, tyranny of the minority’s opinion and worst of all “a communal guide for how to conform and be “accepted” in to society no matter how different you are or What values you must trample over”…A small example of this would be statistic saying “89% of all teenagers buy hats from American Eagle Outfitters” so now everyone who doesn’t buy hats feels as if something is wrong with them and won’t be accepted with out buying hats… So, they instantly go out of their way to change their character and behavior; just to be accepted within a statistic. This on a bigger scale is choosing to devalue our differences, changing the way we choose to live our lives and see our selves, only because a statistic that said nothing about real people anyway, made us a minority in society. The single worst impact numbers have made on our society is its promotion of an fallacious ideology that says “more is better” and “using numbers to materialize human qualities is ok’. This is the notion that runs our social status system telling us, the person with the highest SAT score or GPA is the smartest, the most civilized country has the most Grosse National Product, and person with most money is the most valuable successful and happy. Although obviously false, This ideology has created a cult that has at one point or another reached us all creating an epidemic of people living their lives as equations with no other purpose but achieving numbers. The person who says, “First I went to this school to get this GPA, to get in to this school, to get this diploma, so I could get this job, where I could get this money, and get this wife, and have these kids, buy this house, with this car, and all these things. Mean while at school I was too busy studying and cheating the system to go outside or talk to my family. The only reason I played those games was so I could win. I spend so much time at a job that I hate hat my wife wants a divorce, my kids hardly know me. I’m not sure what this is all for, I thought I was supposed to be happy, I have everything.” Success and happiness aren’t simple, they cant plotted on to a map, held in your hand or measured they are custom fit to everyone, they are designed as internal rewards for doing what we think is right,and for using means to justify ends. What numbers tell us will never work. By only thinking linear you become blind to so much. In this small speech it is unfair and unrealistic for me to call for societal change although it would be nice. I only hope I can help you see that. You just need to be Human, no matter what, don’t let numbers define who you are, what is beautiful, what is right, or tell you how to live. Our internal instinct is a powerful thing not meant to be ignored because of a small inanimate man made unit; it’s simply not worth it. "
or we could look at the REAL numbers, the deep numbers. I think our problem is instead that we have become too shallow with numbers.
it's not a criticism, it is another approach to thought. I would suggest the isaac asimov book "foundation" but, a quick explanation is that, given a high enough resolution read (can't exist, but, for arguments sake) you could map, quantify, qualify, every stimulus, and calculate probabilities of reactions. the ocean is like that. and, so too, may individuals be.
numbers are a language, and most people aren't given fluency because most american teachers don't have fluency, it'd be like someone who was trying to teach english without knowing it.
People matter; their personal constitutions matter; their virtues matter. And the reason they matter has to do with the radical uncertainty of these future-making practices. You need to know about the virtues of people because there is little else you can rely on that is so durable and so salient. While there is a clear link with the premodern modes of familiarity that some social historians and social theorists assure us is "lost," the reliance on familiarity and the personal virtues is no mere "survial" of premodernity. Such things don't belong just, or even naturally, to the premodern "world we have lost";they belong equally, or even especially, to the world of making the worlds to come.
that rings true to me, dave. i think the same thing goes for our economy and our education system - they are very shallow and narrow and painfully lacking in substance. seems critical thinking is a lost art.
the economic study of numbers is an act of intentional shallowness. for example an economic study could show that because there are more left handed people in this world, there are more ufo sightings, and therefore lefties are aliens (most extreme example I can possibly render) economics are statistics retarded younger brother. and since most people think econ = stat anymore, especially in grade school, fuck it, all a god damned waste of time.
ok, i was actually talking about the things that people are interested in/buy, creation of "needs," and capitalism... but yeah, statistics can get pretty ridiculous, for sure... the idea that people don't know the difference between stats and econ is pretty depressing..
Real stats are amazing, elegant, and beautiful, and rare as the lovers sigh exhaled by a bumble bee on the last petal of a daisy in the heart of winter.
