JOLLY DAYS

Statistics and American Idol

Shows like American Idol celebrate the average devoid of values other than marketability to the largest public possible.

This review discusses an assessment of the effect statistical analysis has had on modern culture.

…it’s about social science data — specifically, about the increasing use of surveys, polls and other forms of statistical measurements beginning in the years after World War I.

The average mind is what mass culture is about. There isn't any such thing as the average mind. We are as individual as snowflakes; our behavior and attitudes a complex web that sometimes glances the norm (average) only to bounce quickly back to our own destiny — a mix of genetics, circumstance, and personal decisions. But conformism is given an authentic aura when turned into “scientific” data — numbers. Conventional thinking is bolstered by the herd instinct manifested in statistics.

…government bureaucrats used them in an effort to better manage the burgeoning technocratic state…

The uses of statistics can make them socially dangerous. Years ago feminists used a study that indicated that young girls were falling behind academically in their early teens. Funds were shifted to help these young women, conferences assembled to discuss the unfairness. It later turned out that the “study” was a speculation, and the scientist who made the suggestion disavowed any scientific basis. Later studies showed just the opposite — young women were doing better, graduating more than their male counterparts. Presumably millions of boys were denied help based on a misuse, perhaps a cynically ideological misuse, of statistics.

Finally, the reviewer is correct:

Is the statistical average rendered by pollsters the distillation of America? Or its grinding down into porridge? For all of the hunger Americans have always expressed for cold, hard data about who we are, literary ways of knowing may be profounder than statistical ones. (You can learn as much about life on Main Street from Sinclair Lewis as from… [statisticians].)