Last update: Saturday 5/25/22
The epigram in the image for this blog note provides cruel commentary on the absurd sensibility of our our modern Age of Data Science. We are told that "You can't improve what you don't measure" -- as if knowing that we have attained a horrific national benchmark will somehow enable us to reduce the pain of this catastrophic human loss in the months and years to come. "The plural of anecdote is not data." Yes, the death of one person, one man, one woman, one child is an anecdote. We are supposed to believe that policies are changed by data, by statistics. Nevertheless our individual behaviors, the fundamental stuff that sums up to national statistics, are rarely changed by statistics, but are often changed by anecdotes, as in: a friend died, or a friend of a friend, or even a friend of a friend of a friend. For most of us it isn't real until it becomes personal, until it becomes the stuff of tragic anecdotes. Obituaries are real. National statistics are just bureaucratic blather.
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