Dictate what you know
Most politicians have a single theme, a single solution that stands for everything else. With Trump, it's BUILD A WALL, standing for all the literal and figurative borders and walls and boundaries that have been ripped up in the last 30 years.

Some themes are too simple, like Forbes's FLAT TAX. He didn't use the proposal as an icon for a broader way of thinking. He just wanted FLAT TAX and nothing more. FLAT TAX wouldn't solve anything, and Forbes didn't even try to pretend it would.

If I had a chance to be Commissar For Wall-Building in Science and Education, how would I do it? Literal walls don't make sense. What is a figurative wall in this context, and how would I build it?

Easy. Two words.

NO STATS.

Stats, ESPECIALLY MEANS, blur the distinctions between groups of people and groups of observations. That's THE WHOLE POINT AND PURPOSE OF STATS. A mean is a wall-crasher by definition and purpose.

Instead of stats, use nothing but GRAPHS to report and display data. All graphs must include the time axis. Since we have these new-fangled Electric Brain gadgets now, you should use ANIMATED AND INTERACTIVE GRAPHS as much as possible.

I'd take it further to enforce the whole worldview of METROLOGY. Know your baseline, distinguish constants and variables, calibrate your observations. Don't go beyond what your observations show. Find patterns if patterns exist, but NO STATS and NO THEORIES.

All of this would start with eliminating the MEAN. Every use of the mean helps the rich to deceive the poor, and helps experts to scam the non-experts.



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How does the mean disguise differences among people? Here's a nice simple example, without any emotional loading, from today's clickbait in UK Telegraph.

Sales of liver and other offal have collapsed, from more than 50g per person per week in 1974 to just 5g in 2014, reflecting a move away from traditional butchers to pre-packed supermarket meat.

Nobody eats 50 grams of liver per week. Nobody eats 5 grams of liver per week. This mean disguises the real point. PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT. Some people like to eat liver, most don't. Liver lovers consume about a pound per week. Liver lovers are getting sparser, probably by attrition. Everyone else eats exactly zero liver in a lifetime. The important figure is not mean weekly consumption but how many people are liver lovers. The mean doesn't take you anywhere near this info.

You get a similar distortion in a more important set of info when you use means for employment and income. "Mean income is $28K" tells you LESS THAN NOTHING because a mean is pulled up by the huge numbers in the plutocrat zone. The proper numbers are more detailed, requiring a graph to visualize. And when you see the graph, you INSTANTLY AND VIOLENTLY detect the fraud. Just like liver, the important figure is how many people are working, or how many people have money at all. Some people work full-time, most don't. Some people have lots of money, most have lots of debt. The number of full-time employees is shrinking, and the typical wage for MOST of those employees is also shrinking.

The "global warming" crime is possible because the criminals use stats. The criminals use mean global temperature to mush up a complex set of changes in water and air currents. When you see the changes in DEEP OCEAN water currents, you understand that Evil KKKarbon can't possibly be causing it. As soon as you see a GRAPH of temperature and CO2 against time, you can INSTANTLY AND VIOLENTLY detect the fraud. Neither of these pictures tells us what's actually happening, but both direct our attention toward the earth's core and magnetosphere, not the mean concentration of one tiny chemical component of the atmosphere.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult, Experiential education, Metrology

  ¶ 2:19 AM