Lecture 5

readings

• chs 3-4 of Desrosieres
• Quetelet 1842. A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, pp 5-9

discussion

Quetelet

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

Derosiers

• 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

For the future: Desrosières Ch 4

• Galton

  • eugenics
  • regression
  • correlation

• Probability

  • Bayesian probability as belief
  • Frequentist probability over realizations (or individuals)