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Tue 15 Jun, 2010 06:09 am
- Say a statistical bureau would publish that 50% of humans would do to someone they meet as they would have the person they meet do to them. Would that mean that with the next person you meet you would have a 50% chance of them doing to you as he would have do to himself? And how about if of the last 10 of the humans you met 9 where unfriendly, would you expect the next human to be unfriendly?
Let me put the same question is a different manner. Say there would be a pot of gold placed in a vault on a random day of the week. If you guess the day of the week that it is in there and open the vault on the correct day you get the pot of gold. Say the last 10 weeks there have been pots of gold in the vault on a wednesday 7 times. Would you bet on it being wednesday next week?
The fact is that if you are to guess on a random outcome you have no foothold at all to predict a next outcome. So regardless of you knowing that if you flip a coin there is a 50% chance of it falling on 1 side and the last times where say 7 times heads up. You could never make a sure guess on the next outcome.
How coin-like are humans in relation to their statistics? Say 50% of humans where to adhere to the golden rule "Do to the other as you would have the other do to you.". Would you be able to predict if the next human you meet would adhere to the golden rule? The answer is no. It's called a gambler's fallacy and we should no gamble, especialy not with people.
Yet when using sociological statistics people tend to do this a lot. It's almost like we read a statistic in the newspaper about anything sociological, we base judgement on an individual based on statistics. But the soul and the combination of a lot of souls is so complex that it is more random than that it could be predicted on the base of statistics.
Numbers have no soul, and a soul can not be judged by numbers. Numbers know not the meaning of hope, social evolution, progression. By judging an individual by the use of numbers we irradicate all hope, social evolution and progression. Numbers do not know the meaning of paradigm nor pure chance. By judging an individual on sociological statistics we irradicate all paradigm of pure chance too.
Western science has concentrated mostly on empirical ideas for the past 100 years or so. Which means we have been concentrating on the things had have always been the same, eternal properties. We have been looking for properties of things that have always been the same, are now the same and will always be the same. "A property of a molecule is this and it always will be this" is an empirical truth.
Sociology is looking for empirical truth. Yet in doing so it is undermining paradigm, soul, hope, social evolution, progression or pure chance.
Coming back the the 50% of humans adhering to the golden rule. What are the alternatives to doing to another as you would have the other do to you? Doing to the other as the other has done to you? Doing to the other as you expect the other to do to you? This is surely only helpfull to society if you expect the other to do good to you. How do statistics help in making people expect the other to do good to them, and how does it help to try to predict in the first place. It is gambling with the future on humans and it is a fallacy.
There I conclude that the judgement of an individual based on sociologogical statistics is false and not helpfull.
I think you are making a very basic error in your logic. Just because some statistical calculations are wrong-- doesn't mean that all statistical calculations are wrong.
Statistics, when done correctly, is a very powerful tool to make predictions about groups of people. At times, statistics can increase your chances of a desired outcome when dealing with one person.
I use statistics to make predictions about individuals both at work, and in my (rather obsessive) hobby.
I work for a speech recognition company-- we make money by getting audio from people, and then converting it into text. This process is all statistics, we use what is called a Hidden Markov Model... which is a way of calculating the odds of what a person is saying by understanding the likelihood they would say that based on what they said in the past. Speech recognition is all statistics.
We also build speech recognition "models" for individuals in the institutions who buy our product.. This is a very time consuming, and expensive process. We very carefully use statistics to calculate how much money we will make from each model we build (basically predicting how much use each model will get). This is all done with statistics... making predictions about individuals makes us more profit (over the large scheme of things).
My hobby is poker. Let's you and I are playing a hand where we both know that if you have a King face down in front of you, you have me beat. Any third grader can calculate the odds that a card selected from a deck is a king. What I need to know is how likely you are to take the action you took if you had a King. This is statistics... and the best poker players are the ones who can use statistics to make better predictions about how their opponents will act.
You are correct about the "Gamblers Fallacy" (that in random events, past results don't impact future results).
Where you are wrong is that quite often, events we think are random... aren't really random. It could be that you don't know the rule about the bank vault money... that the person in charge decided that it would always be Wednesday. If this is the case-- you would be foolish to not always pick Wednesday. If the answer is Wednesday enough times... there is a point where I am going to realize that this is not at all random.
One of my favorite poker stories is a young player playing poker with two people who were cheating (they were colluding-- meaning they were acting together to pass information and to support each others actions).
Our hero realizes they are cheating... and then realizes that because they are cheating, their actions are far from random. All of a sudden our hero has a way to understand what they have from how they are acting. What he initially thought was random, wasn't random at all.
Of course, with this understanding, it is pretty easy to take advantage of the situation. The two cheaters didn't fare to well (and evidently didn't figure out their error until too late).
@CD1979,
Quote:There I conclude that the judgement of an individual based on sociologogical statistics is false and not helpfull.
I'm comfortably certain most sociologists would agree. Sociological statistics are not meant to be prescriptive; I can't think of any sociologists who would use data the way you are describing--that is, as a predictor of future conditions. Sociological data are merely statistical records of previously observed behavior.
@Shapeless,
Shapeless wrote:
Quote:There I conclude that the judgement of an individual based on sociologogical statistics is false and not helpfull.
I'm comfortably certain most sociologists would agree. Sociological statistics are not meant to be prescriptive; I can't think of any sociologists who would use data the way you are describing--that is, as a predictor of future conditions. Sociological data are merely statistical records of previously observed behavior.
There are fields that use sociological stats to predict a group's proabale actions in the future. Psychology, Marketing, Economics, Military, Law Enforcement, Insurance, Government. I'm not saying that they shouldn't because past group indicators are very correlatable to future probable individual actions. It could be argued in the cases of government, psychology, and law enforcement that the use of statistical probabilities is utilitarian in the philosophical sense and the other it may be utilitarian in the free economic sense. Now whether or not it is ethical to do this is, as my dad would say, a whole nuther can-o-worms.
@GoshisDead,
Fair enough. Amusingly, in the examples you mentioned, the marketers seem to me to come off as the most scrupulous since they usually have the merit of changing their stance (i.e. hawking new wares) when consumer behavior deviates from expectation.
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