Statistics and Lies

I was recently having a discussion with a group of students, specifically about Marvin Harris’ discussion of the importance of statements of co-variance and his call for a more statistically oriented anthropology in The Rise of Anthropological Theory (affectionately – or disaffectionately – referred to as The RAT during my time as a master’s student at the University of Georgia).

One student objected that “Statistics are basically just lies.”

I was a bit taken aback by this.

Statistics can be used to mislead or distort things. For example, it’s fairly common to encounter figures on median income for U.S. households in the mainstream mass media. There’s no particular reason to doubt the accuracy of such figures in most cases, but one could begin to wonder why reportage of mean household income is much less common, much less why the two central tendency measures are so rarely seen together. But statistics per se aren’t lies.

Statistics involves a set of analytical tools and ways of thinking about sets of data. As with any other tool, statistics can be misused. But saying that statistics are lies because they can be used to lie strikes me a bit like saying that words are inherently lies because words are used to lie. (There are some who think that – but they’re lying.)

Still, there is a real and strong distrust of statistics among many cultural anthropologists and scholars in the humanities disciplines. This seems to me to derive from the now old (and tired) divide between “quantitative” and “qualitative” scholarship and the strong mutual distrust that has permeated that divide.

I’ve written before on my main blog (see link below) that this is a false divide. There is no non-quantitative research. All scholarship involves an awareness of quantity, whether in the binary mathematics of presence/absence; rough quantification along the lines of something being present in small or large amount, or happening frequently, continuously, or infrequently; or the highly enumerated quantification of precise counting. There is no non-qualitative research. All scholarship involves choice of what to pay attention to, count, etc.

Moreover, the emphasis on the qualitative/quantitative labels tends to obscure what all good scholarship shares in common, which is measurement and interpretation (see “Measurement and Interpretation”). If one moves past the qual/quant divide (the sort of attitude of “I’m not the sort of scholar who does statistics” or “I’m not the sort who pays attention to anything that can’t be quantified” [by which most mean enumeration, because again, there’s nothing that’s without quantity]) then a whole range of analytical tools and ways of thinking are opened up as possibilities, to be deployed as best fits the research question at hand rather than as best fits an ideological commitment to being “qualitative” or “quantitative.”

Scholarship and Revision

The following is something I posted for an open discussion forum within the online Introduction to Anthropology I am currently teaching. It's something that readers of this blog and members of the Peoples and Cultures of the World Class may also find interesting. (The second topic/link is not directly relevant for this course and blog, since it deals with paleoanthropology and primate evolution, but it may be of interest to anyone with a general anthropological interest.)

One quality of good scholarship is a willingness to revise what we thought we understood about the world in light of new discoveries. Good scholarship, whether in the sciences or humanities, involves the production of interpretations and arguments that fit the facts, rather than picking and choosing facts to fit preconceived notions. When new facts are discovered, our interpretations and arguments have to change to incorporate this new information. Inevitably, over the course of our semester together, discoveries will be made that force anthropologists to rethink what we know and to revise our understanding bit by bit. (In other words, scholarship is an ongoing, neverending process.) As this happens, I'll do my best to keep you posted on such new discoveries.

Here, I'd like to draw your attention to two new findings. One area of anthropological research in which many new discoveries are challenging previously held ideas has to do with the archaeological investigation of the origins of urbanization. Here is a link to a blog post discussing recent findings in Mesopotamia from Anthropology.Net:

http://anthropology.net/2007/09/03/challenging-previous-theories-on-the-origins-of-urbanization/

Another field of study where there have been many recent important discoveries is paleoanthropology, the study of human (and non-human primate) biological evolution through the study of the fossil record. In the past few weeks, there's been much discussion among anthropologists of the fossil species Chororapithecus abyssinicus, an East African ape species from around 10 million years ago and possibly a common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, and hominids. The finding of this species helps to fill an important gap in the fossil record, as there have been few fossil finds of apes from this period up until now. The following is a link to a discussion of this species on another anthropology blog, Hot Cup of Joe:

http://hotcupofjoe.blogspot.com/2007/08/10-million-year-old-ape-found-in.html