John Sides’s graph from yesterday (in which he threw some data at claims about unions and budget deficits) reminds me that statisticians (and quantitative social scientists more generally) are literalists.
When someone says that the U.K. boundary commission’s delay in redistricting gave the Tories an advantage equivalent to 10 percent of the vote, we’re the kind of person who looks it up and claims that the effect is less than 0.7 percent.
When someone says, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm,” we’re like, Hey, really? And we go look that one up too.
And when someone says that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters . . . well, let’s not go there.
So, when I was pointed to this blog by Michael O’Hare making the following claim, in the context of K-12 education in the United States:
My [O’Hare’s] favorite examples of this junk [educational content with no workplace value] are spelling and pencil-and-paper algorithm arithmetic. These are absolutely critical for a clerk in an office of fifty years ago, but being good at them is unrelated to any real mental ability (what, for example, would a spelling bee in Chinese be?) and worthless in the world we live in now. I say this, by the way, aware that I am the best speller that I ever met (and a pretty good typist). But these are idiot-savant abilities, genetic oddities like being able to roll your tongue. Let’s just lose them.
My first reaction was: Are you sure? I also have no systematic data on this, but I strongly doubt that being able to spell and add are “unrelated to any real world abilities” and are “genetic oddities like being able to roll your tongue.” For one thing, people can learn to spell and add but I think it’s pretty rare for anyone to learn how to roll their tongue! Beyond this, I expect that one way to learn spelling is to do a lot of reading and writing, and one way to learn how to add is to do a lot of adding (by playing Monopoly or whatever). I’d guess that these are indeed related to “real mental ability,” however that is defined.
My guess is that, to O’Hare, my reactions would miss the point. He’s arguing that schools should spend less time teaching kids spelling and arithmetic, and his statements about genetics, rolling your tongue, and the rest are just rhetorical claims. I’m guessing that O’Hare’s view on the relation between skills and mental ability, say, is similar to Tukey’s attitude about statistical models: they’re fine as an inspiration for statistical methods (for Tukey) or as an inspiration for policy proposals (for O’Hare), but should not be taken literally. That things I write are full of qualifications, which might be a real hindrance if you’re trying to propose policy changes.
P.S. I wonder if this also relates to my reaction to this column from David Brooks:
States with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises. They tend to have workplaces where personnel decisions are made on the basis of seniority, not merit. There is little relationship between excellence and reward, which leads to resentment among taxpayers who don’t have that luxury.
Maybe the first claim is true (the correlation between public sector unionization is correlated with fiscal crisis) and maybe the second claim is true (that hiring in these workplaces is less like to be made on the basis of merit). But I’d like to see the data. I’m not saying the evidence isn’t out there to support Brooks’s claims, just that, as a statistician, I’m less inclined to make such statements unless I’m pretty sure that the numbers are there to back me up.
P.P.S. Just to be clear: I’m not saying that a statistician needs certainty. Not at all: we often have to make decisions based on partial information. It’s just our nature to be careful to acknowledge our uncertainty