Re:In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at ...
by coldtea on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @10:36PM
(#11444274)
>The ensuing unqualified speculation at times borders on the ridiculous: "We are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them." Maybe Sedaris and the New Yorker IT dept have developed a secret algo to qualify factual statements like this one?
If you treat social observations like physics, and expect statistical confirmation you're missing the plot.
Some of those cannot be statistically confirmed, but are nevertheless apparent to anyone with some life experience.
Others don't need to be confirmed, because they depend on subjective evaluations. You either come to see the writer's point and share their ethical values or not.
This very modern idea that any talk about society needs to be measured and analyzed with numbers and statistical proofs, is hampering our thinking. And it's even dangerous, people it gets people from thinking and evaluating arguments on their own, to blindly trusting some numbers which could be BS, manipulated, statistically non-representative etc.
But even more so, it kills their own appreciation and understanding of the world they live in, having them wait for 'the research' to come out for them to affirm anything.
If you treat social observations like physics, and expect statistical confirmation you're missing the plot.
Some of those cannot be statistically confirmed, but are nevertheless apparent to anyone with some life experience.
Others don't need to be confirmed, because they depend on subjective evaluations. You either come to see the writer's point and share their ethical values or not.
This very modern idea that any talk about society needs to be measured and analyzed with numbers and statistical proofs, is hampering our thinking. And it's even dangerous, people it gets people from thinking and evaluating arguments on their own, to blindly trusting some numbers which could be BS, manipulated, statistically non-representative etc.
But even more so, it kills their own appreciation and understanding of the world they live in, having them wait for 'the research' to come out for them to affirm anything.