Quetelet's legacy

There's an old quip that there are lies, damned lies, and then there's statistics.

I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, but the misuse of statistics is a significant problem.  Even how numbers are presented can make a huge difference in how they're perceived -- something that is routinely done to shape public opinion.  Considering the following:

There are three medicines -- A, B, and C -- that are being considered to treat an aggressive form of cancer.  Upon large clinical trials, it is found that over five years following treatment, drug A reduces the risk of recurrence from 94% to 88%, B increases the chances of remaining cancer-free by six percent, and C doubles your chance of staying healthy during that time.

Which one do you choose to take?

It turns out, of course, that the statistics of all three are identical.  Your chance of being cancer-free after taking A is 12%, as compared to 6% without the drug.  That's the same as B -- an increase of 6% in the chance of remaining healthy.  But it's also the same as C, because going from a 6% to a 12% remission rate represents an increase by a factor of two.

But to a lot of people, they all sound different.  Don't fool yourself by thinking this kind of thing isn't being used, deliberately, to mislead.  Especially, any time you see statistics such as, "Doing ____ doubles your risk!", the first thing you should ask is, "What is my risk of the same bad outcome if I don't do _____?"  

After all, twice a very small number is still a very small number.

Things get even more muddled when you throw averages into the mix.  Oh, they have their uses; looking at the average score on a well-constructed test, for example, can tell a teacher if, as a whole, (s)he is teaching the students effectively.  The problem occurs when you start trying to apply averages in situations where they don't belong, such as the statement that the average human has slightly less than one testicle.

As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, significant > true.

In large part, we owe our incessant focus on turning everything into numbers to two men -- Adolphe Quetelet and Francis Galton.  Quetelet, a Belgian polymath, at least started out with good intentions; he'd noticed how a lot of physical characteristics, from human heights to repeated position measurements of astronomical objects, followed a normal distribution (colloquially called a "bell curve"), where there are a few extreme outliers and a great many values in the middle.  That the ubiquity of this pattern could be due to more than one thing -- in my two examples, that the first was because of the effects of genetics, diet, and body mechanics, and the second due to random measurement error -- he conveniently glossed over.

Adolphe Quetelet (ca. 1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Quetelet then took a dangerous leap.  Because this pattern was common, he decided it must be good.  He started measuring everything he could, and found the same pattern showing up in assessments of intelligence, body/mass index, individual wealth, size and position of facial features, and skull shape.  He began an obsessive quest for l'homme moyen -- the "average man," whose characteristics showed the least possible deviation from the norm.

Which Quetelet decided also had to be the "best possible man."

Then Francis Galton took hold of this idea, and ran right off the cliff with it.  Galton was an English statistician and psychologist (and, incidentally, Charles Darwin's cousin), and also a raging racist, who decided to use Quetelet's methods to prove his thesis that other races, especially Black Africans, were inherently inferior to White Europeans.  He wasn't subtle about it.  "The average intellectual standard of the Negro race is some two grades below our own," Galton wrote.  "It is mere heredity.... [Black Africans] are lazy, palavering savages...  It would be for the best if some means could be contrived for the coast of Africa be given to Chinese colonists so that they might supplant the inferior Negro race."

You would think that some thought might have been given to asking why Black Africans scored lower on Galton's intellectual assessments than White Europeans did, and that someone would suggest such obvious answers as opportunity for education, cultural biases in the assessment tool, and socioeconomic level.  Surprisingly, few did.  The outcome for the Western European elites -- "we're inherently better than the people we're colonizing" -- was so convenient to their goals that it was easier not even to ask the question.

Of course, it bears mention that Galton didn't just hate Black Africans.  He kind of hated everyone who wasn't a member of the English aristocracy.  One of his more astonishing "studies" was a "beauty map" of the United Kingdom, which purported to measure the average beauty of women across the UK, ranking places from the most beautiful to the ugliest.  (The low point, if you're curious, was Aberdeen, Scotland.  Being partly of Scottish descent, I'd like to send a personal memo to Galton to kiss my Celtic ass.)

In 1904, Galton founded the Eugenics Record Office, and along with another person of similar mindset -- his student Karl Pearson -- launched a journal called the Annals of Eugenics (which is still around, but has been rebranded as the Annals of Human Genetics).  Pearson made a huge contribution to the statistical study of genetics, developing methods still in use today.  But he was also responsible for scary stuff like this:

History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.  If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended...  No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings.  Such means may render the individual members of a stock passable if not strong members of society, but the same process will have to be gone through again and again with their offspring, and this in ever-widening circles, if the stock, owing to the conditions in which society has placed it, is able to increase its numbers.

I'd like to be able to give you the comforting message that the racism, bigotry, and flawed use of statistics Galton and Pearson excelled at have disappeared, but it's still with us.  The 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, was little more than a modern reworking of Galton and Pearson.  Despite it receiving enormous amounts of criticism from researchers in cognitive psychology, it's widely credited with influencing our current generation of white supremacists, such as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk.

If you still don't believe me, consider a story that just broke last week, which is the reason the whole topic comes up -- that National Institute of Health genetic data on twenty thousand children have been given to a "group of fringe researchers" who turned around and used it to produce sixteen spurious papers claiming to show a genetic (and racial) basis for intelligence.  It's a breach of both privacy and scientific ethics -- not that this is uncommon given the current regime here in the United States -- and shows that although Francis Galton died over a hundred years ago, his twisted spirit lives on.

Even Quetelet, though, should raise some eyebrows.  What, exactly, does it mean to be average?  I remember having that discussion with my principal during my teaching years.  Suppose a particular kid gets a 75% on a test, and that's the average for the class.  I've seen kids score like that when they were very good at regurgitation of facts (so they got all the questions requiring rote memory correct, but few of the deeper ones) and conversely, from kids who were great at understanding the bigger picture in depth, but had issues with recalling terminology.  How can we justifiably throw those two, very different, groups of students into the same bin, stamped with the same all-important number?

As someone on the neurodivergent end of things, I can vouch for the fact that grades don't really mean much.  I'm definitely not Quetelet's homme moyen, and kind of never have been.  I've got a decent brain, but my grades -- especially in high school and the first two years of college -- weren't all that great.  There were a lot of reasons for that -- perhaps a story for another time -- but my point here is the numbers supposedly characterizing me didn't, perhaps, say everything there was to be said about me intellectually.

Our desire to turn everything into numbers has a long and sketchy history, because so few people stop and ask why the numbers are what they are.  Quetelet's legacy misleads us most, I think, in believing that reality can be captured in data alone.  The world is a complex place, and converting it into a handful of statistics may make it seem simpler. 

But at the same time, it also falls far short.  As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anyone who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Locks and guards

H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Lurker at the Threshold is, like much of his work, uneven.  At its best, it's atmospheric as hell, and has some scenes that will haunt your nightmares long after you turn the last page.  (I swear, I'll never look at a stained-glass window the same way after reading that book.)  It's the story of a man named Ambrose Dewart, who returns to rural Massachusetts after inheriting some property that had passed down in his family from a mysterious great-grandfather "whom no one in the family talked about."  Upon arrival, he reads a set of instructions that had come along with the deed, and finds a baffling warning that he should not damage a stone tower located nearby "lest he abandon his locks and guards."

It's a phrase that's peculiar and evocative, and it's stuck with me since I first read the tale when I was a teenager.  Especially since Ambrose proceeds to ignore the instructions entirely, knocks a hole in the tower so he can get inside, and unleashes chaos.

While overall it's a decent story, Dewart's actions always struck me as completely idiotic.  If you're in an unfamiliar situation, and you receive a set of ominous directives, why would you blunder in and do the exact opposite?  Especially when the implication is by doing so, you're getting rid of something that might be vital for protecting you?

I must say, though, that my sense that "no one would do something that stupid" may have to be revised, now that I've watched the last four weeks of actions by our so-called government here in the United States.

Just in the first month of Trump 2.0, he, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the various other lunatics in charge have:

• withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization
• stripped funding from the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, including ending research into cancer prevention and treatment
• proposed revoking the Affordable Care Act and making drastic cuts to Medicaid
• ended the CDC-led "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign, just as flu-related hospitalizations reached a fifteen-year high of fifty thousand per week
• suggested that anyone on psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants and anxiolytics, should be taken off their medications and forced to go to mandatory "wellness camps"
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center
• withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Parks Service
• fired senior staff in the military, replacing them with Trump loyalists
• fired all the Department of Energy staff who oversee nuclear weapons safety

When this last one got out, there was so much public outcry that the administration reversed course and tried to rehire the fired staff, with only partial success.  It turned out that the person responsible for the cuts was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old SpaceX intern -- one of the techbro hackers Musk now has infiltrating the Department of Justice, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS.

And not one Republican congressperson has stood up and said no to any of it.  Sure, there are some who are probably loving every minute of this, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the spectacularly stupid Nancy Mace.  The scuttlebutt is that a lot of them are horrified, but are "scared shitless" to say anything because they're afraid of reprisals by Trump and his goons. 

The media, too, has been largely complicit, for which you can thank people like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong.  It's being played as "eliminating governmental waste and fraud," but make no mistake about it.  These cuts are not because they're examples of fraudulent spending.  You bring in auditors to find fraud, not hackers.  These decisions are being made purely for ideological reasons (when they're not just idiotic mistakes, like the firing of the nuclear weapons staff).  Epidemics and pandemics sound bad, and things like mandatory vaccinations and mask mandates don't sell well with the MAGA "don't step on muh freedoms" crowd, so no more funding the NIH and CDC.  Can't admit that anthropogenic climate change is happening, because it'll piss off Trump's BFFs in the fossil fuel industry, so destroy NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC.  The National Parks Service stands in the way of opening up the parks to mining, logging, and drilling for oil and natural gas, so they've gotta go.

And we have to make sure the military is led by Trump's christofascist cronies.  The firings went all the way up to the Chiefs of Staff, where Hegseth axed two -- Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chairman Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr.  Hmm... the only woman on the Chiefs of Staff, and the only Black guy.

Wonder what the motivation was there.

See why I thought about Lovecraft's book?  Trump has had over two centuries worth of precedent basically saying, "Here's how to keep our nation and its citizens as safe as possible," and his response was, "Okay, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of all that."

Not that this was probably his conscious thought.  There's a lot of speculation about his being a Russian agent, and working to destroy the United States deliberately, and I find that dubious.  Thing is, he isn't that smart.  His thinking never goes beyond (1) this will get people to praise me, (2) this make me richer, and (3) this will keep me out of jail.  It's more a case of running roughshod through the government to pad his own bank account and keep one step ahead of the people who might try to stop him.

Yeah, if it causes chaos in the United States, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be thrilled, but that's not why it started.  Trump is more a sticky-handed toddler loose in a museum.  He's likely to damage priceless stuff, but it's because he has the attention span of a gnat and zero impulse control, and throws hellacious tantrums when he doesn't get his way immediately.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ritchie333, Trump Baby Balloon at protest in Parliament Square, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as the other people in charge -- well, Musk is in it for the money, although you have to wonder why four hundred billion dollars isn't enough for anyone.  Hegseth, Vance, and Noem are loony ideologues; of all of them, they're the ones most likely to be true believers.  As far as RFK, who the hell knows?  You look into that guy's dead eyes, and it's anyone's guess what's going on behind them.

Look, I understand that government isn't perfect.  Not ours, not any country's in the history of humanity.  There are porkbarrel projects and waste and cronyism, and probably at least some outright fraud.  But you don't fix it by running around with a chainsaw (which, I shit you not, Elon Musk literally did at CPAC last week).  What this represents is a coup by a coalition of fascists and burn-it-all-to-the-ground opportunists, who are using as their public face a man who has never had any thought beyond personal self-aggrandizement.

And in four weeks, we've abandoned -- no, destroyed -- our locks and guards.  Maybe it's not too late to put the pieces back together and keep the monsters from getting loose.  I don't know.  But the Republicans now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court had damn well better figure out where their spines are and stop this.

Or in another four weeks we may not have a nation left to defend.

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