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Lecture 5

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chris wiggins edited this page Feb 12, 2018 · 14 revisions

Feb 12, 2018

readings

  1. Desrosières, Alain. "Correlation and the Realism of Causes," in The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, ch 4.

  2. Galton, Francis. “Typical Laws of Heredity,” Royal Institution of Great Britain. Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members 8 (February 16, 1877): 282ff.

  3. Stephen J. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, ch. 3

OPTIONAL

  1. Student (W. S. Gosset), "The Probable Error of a Mean," Biometrika, 6 (1908), 1-25. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2331554)

  2. Gillham, Nicholas. "Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics." Ann. Rev. Genet. 35 (2001): 83-101.

discussion

broca: bad data practice

  • logical fallacies vs bad stats/bad math
    • e.g., circularity -preview: "ranking" as illposed

bad blood / obscured+censored origins of statistics of statistics

  • "regression"
  • "co-relation"

from Quetelet to Galton

  • the normal curve (and relations to "the bell curve")
    • as error
    • as ranking
  • description+prescription (and preview: correlation v. causality)
    • preview: yule + multivariate regression
    • link: realism vs effective models
    • impact OF law (e.g., Yule is modeling Poor law of 1864 (?))
    • impact ON law
    • untouched: should society be dictaed science
    • preview: pearson the mathematizer

not discussed:

Quetelet

  • science envy
  • "policy" and "social physics"

Desrosières

  • reality of society

  • what we talk about when we talk about averages

    • Statue example: corrupt versions of a perfect reality
    • objective mean: measuring a single object with errors
    • subjective mean: average over a collection of members of a defined population
    • arithmetic mean: average of a feature without any grounds for positing a distribution (and without meaningful cause)

  • causal story in the above: ``constant cause"

  • statistics as measurements of morality

    • crime rates

Levels of analysis in Desrosières

  • philosophy of science/epistemology
  • mathematical technique
  • ontology: what the world is made up of
  • disciplines
    • sociology and social physics
    • public health
  • social/political framing
    • debates on expertise
    • quantification of arts
      • medicine
      • moneyball
      • politics and politicking
  • in history

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