Polls are everywhere, especially during this election year. People such as TV commentator Stuart Rothenberg, who spoke to the AIA Grassroots opening plenary session February 20, make a livelihood from interpreting this endless stream of data. He even referred to himself as a “handicapper” of political races. Others seem to depend more on selectively (rather than accurately) interpreting poll and survey data and, as the saying goes, use research like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.
When the motivation is to convince others, though, the motivation is less pure. Do 9 out of 10 dentists really recommend my toothpaste? After decades of questioning this approach, we tend to get jaded. We hear that research indicates coffee, chocolate, meat, carbohydrates, you name it was bad yesterday, good today, and a question mark for tomorrow. So what is the balance between cynicism and realism; wanting to believe and being gullible? (And did you know that “gullible” is the most commonly used word in the English language that is not in any dictionary?)
Comments (2)
Presidential campaigns & The Mask of Statistics.
Beyond the mask of statistics lies a world of substance. We have real problems to solve. We measure reality and generate statistics from the data. Surveys should not be published without the full body of data being published as well. We need to be concerned more with what has not been measured.
We exchange the real world of enormous complexity for the simple statistical expression of data we deem to be important. As if the important information has somehow been fully captured.
Statistics are an abstract representation and like all abstraction, political statistics capture reality only by reduction to a selected form. A form aimed at a superficial evaluation of the contest. We collect statistics based upon what we have predetermined to be most relevant questions to the contest but not to the problems we need to solve.
Such abstraction is a distortion of the truth by it's nature. It is designed to it's purpose.
Statistics capture a limited response by the body politic to the political campaign of candidates seeking election to the presidency. The focus is on popularity among voters.
The focus is all about who's winning where; but the real question, never measured, is which candidate has defined the most desired future state, communicated that vision and wields the most viable design solution for achieving it.
Popularity of the candidate is not a measure that means anything in the context of the problems that actually are important and the differentiation between candidates is small because popularity is more important than problem we will elect a president to solve. The popularity of the candidate is more important than the problems or the solutions to them.
So campaigns are designed to get the votes to win not elect the candidate with the capacity to lead us in the right direction in the problem context.
We currently need solutions to three major global problems; a rapidly growing global population estimated to be more than 10 billion by 2050, rapid climate change driving the mass extinctions of species, flood, drought and heavy storm (see the Architecture 2030 web site) and running parallel, to these two, the expanding proliferation of nuclear weapons.
What we need from candidates is actually the solutions to these and other problems facing the future of this nation and not the most marketable brand of generalization.
Presidential candidates are being sold like soap in a box. Wrong focus.
Posted by Terry L. Walker, AIA | February 22, 2008 6:18 PM
Posted on February 22, 2008 18:18
And if you believe that "gullible" cannot be found in any dictionary, you must be....really gullible.
Posted by William Beyer, FAIA | February 22, 2008 11:54 AM
Posted on February 22, 2008 11:54