Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
“The newly mathematized statistics became a fetish in fields that wanted to be sciences. During the 1920s, when sociology was a young science, quantification was a way of claiming status, as it became also in economics, fresh from putting aside its old name of political economy, and in psychology, fresh from a separation from philosophy. In the 1920s and 1930s even the social anthropologists counted coconuts.”
Deirdre McCloskey, The Trouble with Mathematics and Statistics in Economics
“The Cabinet Ministers, the army of their subordinates . . . have for the most part received a university education, but no education in statistical method. We legislate without knowing what we are doing. The War Office has some of the finest statistics in the world. What comes of them? Little or nothing. Why? Because the Heads do not know how to make anything of them. Our Indian statistics are really better than those of England. Of these no use is made in administration. What we want is not so much (or at least not at present) an accumulation of facts, as to teach men who are to govern the country the use of statistical facts.”
Florence Nightingale in a letter to Benjamin Jowett, from Kopf, E. W. (1916). Florence Nightingale as statistician. Publications of the American Statistical Association, 15(116), 388–404.
“The unfortunate habit in the mental testing field of devising a new test, administering it to some arbitrarily chosen group of subjects, calling these ‘the standardization population’, and then leaving it at that, does not seem to call for comment.” (Ehrenberg, 1955, p. 26, footnote 1)
Ehrenberg, A. S. C. (1955). Measurement and mathematics in psychology. British Journal of Psychology, 46(1), 20–9.
“We think that we know about uncertainty, and that when we have added a standard error or a confidence interval to a point estimate we have increased knowledge in some way or other. To many people, it does not look like that; they think that we are taking away their certainties – we are actually taking away information, and, if that is all that we can do, we are of no use to them. This was brought home to me forcibly when Peter Moore and I appeared before the Employment Select Committee of the House of Commons – which is not a random sample of the population at large. Our insistence that we could not deliver certainties was regarded as a sign of weakness, if not downright incompetence. One may laugh at that, but that is the way it was – and that is what we are up against. We must persist […].” (David Bartholomew, discussion of Goldstein and Spiegelhalter 1996, p. 428).
“The address that Moore delivered to the British Academy, entitled ‘Proof of an External World,’ caused him a great deal of torment in its preparation. He worked hard at it, but the concluding portion displeased him, and he could not get it right as the time approached for his appearance before the Academy. On the day of the lecture he was still distressed about the ending of the paper. As he was about to leave the house to take the train to London, Mrs. Moore said, in order to comfort him, ‘Cheer up! I’m sure they will like it.’ To which Moore made this emphatic reply: ‘If they do, they’ll be wrong!’” [Source]
“These internal tyrants, whether they be in the form of public opinion or what will mother say, or brother, father, aunt, or relative of any sort; what will Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Comstock, the employer, the Board of Education say? All these busybodies, moral detectives, jailers of the human spirit, what will they say? Until woman has learned to defy them all, to stand firmly on her own ground and to insist upon her own unrestricted freedom, to listen to the voice of her nature, whether it call for life’s greatest treasure, love for a man, or her most glorious privilege, the right to give birth to a child, she cannot call herself emancipated. How many emancipated women are brave enough to acknowledge that the voice of love is calling, wildly beating against their breasts, demanding to be heard, to be satisfied.”
—Emma Goldman (1911), The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation
“If you are an endocrinologist you are allowed to study a vast array of problems — sexuality, personality, growth, disease processes, etc. — in addition to the internal functioning of the endocrine system, so long as you explore the relationship between the endocrine system and those explananda. Endocrinology is monogamous in its explanatory variable — the hormone system — but promiscuous in its dependent variables. […] Oncology, in contrast, is a dependent variable discipline. As an oncologist you can study any conceivable cause of cancer — toxins, genetics, viruses, even psychological states. Oncology is monogamous in its dependent variable but promiscuous in its independent variables.”
—Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts
“Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.” (Henry Charles Bukowski.)
“Every normal man, woman, and child is, then, a genius at something as well as an idiot at something.
“It remains to discover what – at any rate in respect of the genius. This must be a most difficult matter, owing to the very fact that it occurs in only a minute proportion out of all possible abilities. It certainly cannot be detected by any of the testing procedures at present in current usage, but these procedures are capable, I believe, of vast improvement.
“The preceding considerations have often appealed to me on looking at a procession of the unemployed, and hearing some one whisper that they are mostly the unemployable. That they are so actually I cannot help concurring. But need they be so necessarily ? Remember that every one of these, too, is a genius at something – if we could only discover what. I cherish no illusion, indeed, that among them may be marching some ‘mute inglorious Milton, some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’ For these are walks in life that appear to involve a large amount of g. But I am quite confident that every one of them could do something that would make him a treasure in some great industrial concern; and I see no reason why some should not have even become famous, in such occupations, for example, as those of dancers, jockeys, or players of popular games.”
Spearman, C. (1925). Some Issues in the Theory of`”g”‘(including the Law of Diminishing Returns). Nature, 116, 436-439.
“The road from scientific law to scientific measurement can rarely be traveled in the reverse direction. To discover quantitative regularity one must normally know what regularity one is seeking and one’s instruments must be designed accordingly; even then nature may not yield consistent or generalizable results without a struggle. […] I venture the following paradox: The full and intimate quantification of any science is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Nevertheless, it is not a consummation that can effectively be sought by measuring. As in individual development, so in the scientific group, maturity comes most surely to those who know how to wait.” (Kuhn, 1961, pp. 189-190)