So Who's Counting?

Brian Doherty from the December 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

John Allen Paulos's book is about the retail end of the information economy, and his stance is a gentle antidote to the abrasive despair that contemplation of Crossen and Eberstadt might lead to. Though he touches on many of the same topics as Brenner and Crossen, he is far more bemused, less appalled. His tone is more urbane, more charming than their sometimes strident alarmism. Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, takes his reader on a friendly walk through the various ele ments of a typical daily newspaper, and applies the reasoning skills and outlook of the mathematician to them.

This often leads him to inculcate skepticism about the numbers you read in the paper, but with the quiet recognition that we don't know where all these numbers are coming from, many of them seem to conflict, and anyway "ambiguity, randomness, and lack of information in response to obses sive questions and concerns can...breed delusions and mirages." That's the root of the cult of num bers: We crave certainty we can't have, and numbers, however gathered, give us the illusion we crave. "Whether the issue is trade, the environment, or health care, politicians who abjure unwarranted expressions of certitude deserve plaudits, not pillory."

Because of Paulos's quiet good sense and wide-ranging mind, his book is far more of a plea sure to read than the others under discussion. It is simply nifty, larded with clever and informative tidbits as he strolls his broad, discursive way through typical newspaper reporting.

Some examples: Paulos explains the paradox of how even a diagnostic test that is 99 percent accurate for a disease, if that disease is rare, will give far more false positives than accurate ones. And while calming fears about minute contaminants that sound huge on the molecular level, he writes: "[A]ny mathematically expressed scientific fact can be transformed into a consumer caveat...that will terrify....
Warning: This product attracts every other item in the universe with a force equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them."

There is no one solution to the complications that numbers can add to our understanding of the world. One unfashionable bit of advice is to say a good word for reason (and moderation) over reflexive empiricism. We need more empiricism of the "let's see what's happening" vein and less of the "we've got to count it" veinespecially when attempting to sift out accurately the causes of inherently complicated, multicausal events like disease, poverty, and the like. Obviously, in some cases, especially epidemiology, some attempt at counting is an inherent part of finding out what's happening. But we shouldn't assume, especially when the counts are huge, that the data we get from them is unfailingly trustworthy.

Even when numbers do have valuable things to tell us, there are many slips between even rigorous work of science and what gets out to the public. Ignorance and carelessness on the parts of both the messenger (the disseminators of the data and the journalists who report them) and those receiving the message (we out here in the reading public) make numbers tricky things indeed.

The proper response to Big Numbers is sometimes just a horselaugh, or at the very least sus pended judgment. The one thing we all must economize on is time; few of us can explore, probingly, "How do they know that?" and pursue the question ruthlessly. The information economy is curious: The demand for knowledge outstrips the reliable supply. The economy of knowledge sometimes produces counterfeits as a result.

A chapter in Eberstadt's book is an excellent summary example of how the cult of numbers can lead to trouble. Eberstadt is writing about the CIA's studies of the Soviet Union, and calls them "the largest single project in social science research ever undertaken." He then goes on to expose the largest social science project ever undertaken as fatally flawed in almost every aspect.

The CIA took Soviet data at face value, because "that assumption facilitates the use of the complex econometric models they have devised," leading analysts to "estimates of spurious preci sion and questionable accuracy." (They trusted flawed data because their method required numbers, any numbers.) They never publicly explained their methods and procedures. (As newspaper numbers are rarely presented with enough information for the skeptical reader to judge how trustworthy they are.)

The CIA was in a position where it had to come up with knowledge that its analysts really had no way of knowing; unable to just admit ignorance, they attempted to fake it. The cult of numbers bound them to a bad method and blinded them to what simple reasoning from fast-and-loose empiri cism might have taught them. Their exaggerated reports of the Soviet economy's productivity flew in the face of the impressions of poverty and squalor of those Westerners who were presumably seeing the best face the Soviets had to offer; but that sort of non-numerical information had no place.

Too much energy and resources are expended today in pursuit of a precision that is just beyond us. Not all of it is as potentially damaging as the CIA's exaggeration of Russia's productive prowess, but all of it clutters the world with fake knowledge that is often not necessary.

I once had occasion to read, in rough draft, a piece of political writing by a friend. He knew the trends he was discussing very well, but hadn't yet had time to look up precise numbers. So the draft merely featured bolded xs in place of all the numbers: blank signposts of irrelevant larding to come.

The lack of precise numbers affected my comprehension of his argument not a whit; the real numbers, if they had been there, would have stuck in my mind no more firmly than those bolded xs. Whose eyes do not glaze over at the array of survey results, polls, and macroaggregations that are necessarily marshalled to buttress every argument made nowadays, like the banner of the Lord marshalled behind warriors in olden days?

The misuse of numbers in our culture is not a crisis. But it is an annoyance to those of us who read newspapers every day along with the charming Mr. Paulos. We can combat that annoyance with his remedies, plus a dash of Ludwig von Mises: Good spirits, a solid grounding in some basic math ematical and statistical principle, and a realization that there are some things that can't be counted anyway, and so what if they could?

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