After reading Mismeasure of Man it is easy to be wary of all the "facts" that are backed up by great amounts of data and statistics. Many in class today said that this book has made them skeptical of science and uneasy to believe what is said in the media. This is quite understandable considering the "scientists" we read about were blinded by their own bias and looked for data that would promote their own agenda. Rather than blaming science and statistics, however, we should walk away knowing how data can be abused and manipulated. It is not science that promoted ideas of racism, but the people conducting the experiments. Morton emphasized that the skull sizes of different races proved how white men are superior, but when Gould looked at his data he found no statistical significance to suggest that. Later on, when Binet started measuring skull sizes, he realized the numbers did not support the theory.
Today, we are bombarded with information and statistics that many simply take to be true. It is easy to simply accept what we hear and read as fact, but we must remember how data can be abused. This book shouldn't shake our views of science and statistics, but open our eyes to question the person reporting it.
I really enjoy this point. I don't think it was quite described this way in class. The science and the statistics might have been gathered as best as they could have been at the time, but it was the scientists who were botching the data. Now I guess I'm a xenophobe! (just kidding)
ReplyDeleteI agree completely. Math, measurement, and statistics are simply tools that, like any other tool, can be used well or poorly, for good or bad. We don't blame cars for causing accidents; we blame the people behind the wheel. One of the main messages I got from this book is that just because numbers are seemingly hard and objective, that doesn't mean we can forget the subjective people behind them.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with your posts Rebecca and Emma, and while I don't think the book has changed my mindset to one that is completely distrustful of everything in print or media, it has definitely taught me some important things to keep an eye out for and some questions to answer when approaching presented with supposedly "hard data." The point from the book that most stuck with me was definitely the idea of the allure of numbers, and how, for some reason, we're very quick to believe things when you throw a few numbers behind them. I think that even though people are more skeptical today they still place a lot of faith in the idea of numbers as an irrefutable source of truth, and forget about the people behind those numbers.
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