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ThaliaJulme-FirstPaper 7 - 19 Feb 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | The overvaluing of statistics is part of a larger problem, one that has been the topic of our class discussions: the modern inability to create meaning. Many theorists, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Max Weber, and Jurgen Habermas, have discussed the connection between rationalization, technology, and modern man’s inability to produce meaning. In essence, they all argue that the march of modernity has been toward increased rationalization, and that modern man is worse off for it. This increased rationalization, they argue, has hampered our ability to produce meaning, or to produce anything meaningful. It is ironic then that Cohen posits that statistics are part of the project of creative legal thinking.
The functionalist study of statistics thus allows for the exploration of many societal problems.
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- I think this is a very promising start. At the linguistic level, the primary route to improvement is the shortening of sentences. You have impressively tight control over sentence flow, which is crucial to good writing, but you let too many words ride for free. "Crime statistics and inflammatory crime reporting often convince the citizenry of the existence of increased crime," for example, means "Journalists and politicians misuse statistics to inflate people's fears."
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- I think this is a very promising start. At the linguistic level, the primary route to improvement is the shortening of sentences. You have impressively tight control over sentence flow, which is crucial to good writing, but you let too many words ride for free. "Crime statistics and inflammatory crime reporting often convince the citizenry of the existence of increased crime," for example, means "Journalists and politicians misuse statistics to inflate people's fears." On the substantive level, I think the most effective route to improvement lies in compressing your discussion of one example (the publication of crime statistics) to offer an amplified treatment of the question you identify as important: What do statistics do? At the moment, you show what crime statistics do, which --in your accounting--has much to do with establishing the line between Us and Other, normal and deviant, in the familiar Durkheimian manner. But that's a species in some genus, and by limiting yourself to a single example you make it impossible for us to see the contour of the genus as a whole. What else, one wants to ask, does statistics do? And how do the different things it does combine into a whole?
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