The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates perfectly how the operation of science changes when questions of urgency, stakes, values and uncertainty collide -in the 'post-normal' regime. Well before the coronavirus pandemic, statisticians were debating how to prevent malpractice such as p-hacking, particularly when it could influence policy 1 . Now, computer modelling is in the limelight, with politicians presenting their policies as dictated by 'science' 2 . Yet there is no substantial aspect of this pandemic for which any researcher can currently provide precise, reliable numbers. Known unknowns include the prevalence and fatality and reproduction rates of the virus in Pandemic politics highlight how predictions need to be transparent and humble to invite insight, not blame.
The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.
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Objectivity in science has normally been defined by scholars as almost synonymous with realism. It may be advantageous to think of it instead in terms of impersonality, an ideal that would replace arbitrariness, idiosyncracy and judgment by explicit rules. Accounting is an exemplar of this aspect of objectivity. More important than the true representation of deep underlying financial identities is the maintenance of a system of rules that blocks self-interested distortion. Otherwise, tax codes and corporate reports would lose their credibility. From this standpoint, quantification appears as a strategy for overcoming distance and distrust. This pertains also to the natural sciences, where measurement and statistics have been crucial in transforming local experimental skills into public knowledge. We need to understand quantification as a response to a set of political problems, part of the moral economy of science. Its use in science is analogous in important ways to the explicitly political and administrative purposes served by accounting.
The ArgumentQuantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of quantification in science, social science, and bureaucratic social and economic policy are analogous in important ways to accountancy.
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