Bored in Space

Bored In Space

Posted on by jabittan
“With each successive mission, space exploration becomes a little more routine. To the point, incredibly, of boredom,” writes Mary Roach in Packing for Mars. Humans are incredibly adaptable, and that means that we adjust to extraordinary circumstances and accept them as normal once they have been part of our lives for a long enough period of time. In Packing for Mars Roach explains that this has happened with space travel. Riding a massively explosive rocket outside the earths atmosphere and living in a confined space beyond the protective shell of the Earth is an incredible achievement for all of humanity. And it is also routine and hardly thought about by most people. In some ways it is inspiring that space travel is hardly inspiring. It means we have succeeded beyond a level any human could have imagined just a couple hundred years ago. It is also, however, somewhat depressing. It means we don’t recognize just how far our technological innovations have taken us, and we don’t always appreciate just how much we have learned and done through scientific exploration.
Today is an interesting time to be thinking about human adaptability, unprecedented times that become normal and routine, and major discoveries that could reshape our world. We have been dealing with a global pandemic that many of us have simply accepted at this point in time. Many of us just want to ignore it and move on with our lives. We have adapted to the risks of COVID-19, maybe modified our behaviors and life patterns a little bit, and we barely think about the number of cases and deaths from the disease each day. Early in the pandemic I spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at case statistics, charts, and trend lines of what was happening with the virus. Now, with two vaccine doses under my belt (or in my arm) I hardly think about case counts, even though I am aware of breakthrough infections and rising deaths across the country. I have simply adapted and the story of COVID-19 as normal and sometimes boring. I know I am not the only one in this boat, and that is part of why the pandemic hasn’t ended.
The pandemic also brought us breakthroughs with MRNA vaccines in the last year, a big scientific step forward in fighting diseases and developing vaccines for many diseases in the future. This was the key to returning the world to some sort of normalcy and vaccine news was huge for a few months, but now my sense is that many of us expect to get a booster shot, but that it barely registers in our day to day thinking. Vaccines, just as space travel, are amazing, but routine and boring (at least for the 49.6% of Americans who are vaccinated according to the CDC on 8/28/2021).
I think it is important that we be aware of how adaptable we are as human beings. Just as we get used to the idea of people living on space stations and vaccines being developed for deadly diseases, we adapt to our spouses and partners who were once the most exciting sparks in our lives. We adapt to the houses we live in, the cars we  drive, the restaurants we eat at, and everything that becomes a  normal part of our routines. We become bored living lives that our ancestors could only dream of. We fail to appreciate how wonderful some of the relationships in our lives are, we stop being thankful for the nice things we live with, and we become bored with miracle innovations like safe drinking water. When we don’t appreciate these things we don’t give them the attention they deserve, and things can break down and atrophy, only to remind us of how fortunate we were to have that thing. We should pause and think about how amazing our lives may be (recognizing that many of us have serious challenges to overcome in our lives), and we should try to be amazed by even the simple things we have come to take for granted. We are incredibly adaptable and that can help us survive in extreme circumstances, but it can also mean that we fail to appreciate the small miracles that make our lives worth living.

Exploring Humanity by Exploring Space

Posted on by jabittan
In her book Packing for Mars Mary Roach writes, “space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?”
I really like this quote. When I typically think about exploring what it means to be human I think about current art and pop culture, about ancient human societies and the art and culture of those societies, and about our relationships and connections. I don’t often think about the cold vacuum of space, of planets beyond the earth, or of gravitational waves. But Roach suggests that we can learn a lot about humanity by studying the ways in which we have studied extreme cosmic phenomenon and explored those places where our bodies were never meant to be. By studying humans in such environments, by looking at the innovations that keep us alive in space, and by examining our search for the secrets of the universe, something deep and meaningful about humanity is revealed.
Roach is famous for exploring the parts of the world that we would rather not think about. There are countless innovations and discoveries that make life easier for all of us, but that we would rather not think about. Roach, however, is not afraid to look at dirty, messy, and sometimes disgusting science directly, all in an attempt to better understand our humanity. It turns out that space exploration is a perfect area of study for someone like Mary Roach. It also turns out that we can learn a lot about who we are, about the things we need, the luxuries we could live without, and how our societies operate when we study space and the efforts that go into keeping people alive and comfortable in space.
Humans did not evolve to live in space, and keeping someone alive on a space station or flying on a space shuttle requires that we truly know what it means to be human. It means we have to think about the mind, the body, our basic needs, and beyond. What does it mean to live on a diet of food designed to be highly digestible to leave the fewest possible waste products at end? What does it mean to be in a confined space for long periods of time? And what is it like thinking about these problems and how to solve them? The answer to each of these questions teaches us more about ourselves. By looking up, by striving to move away from the planet, and by putting ourselves in places we never belonged we learn more about ourselves, our societies, and our shared humanity. Space teaches us about ourselves, even if that wasn’t the goal when we set out to explore the stars.
A Sense of Danger

A Sense of Danger

Posted on by jabittan
2020 was a unique year in many senses, and one worrying change in 2020 was an increase in violence that seems to be continuing through 2021. Crime rates have been falling across the United States since a peak in the 1990s, until a reversal in the trend in 2020. We have not yet seen whether it is an anomaly related to the COVID-19 Pandemic that will dissipate, or whether it reflects a new trajectory of violence that we need to be concerned about. Nevertheless, crime has recently been on an uptick after a long decline.
People may currently be aware of an increase in crime, but that likely doesn’t mean that the increase in crime feels new to them. Despite the recent falling crime rates, people’s general perception of crime is that it had been increasing before 2020. The perception of increasing crime did not match the continual drop in crime, at least not until 2020. Part of the misperception seems to come from the constant news reporting of crime and better measures of crime by police and the FBI. Christopher Jencks wrote about this in his book The Homeless, “police have spent billions of dollars computerizing their record keeping systems, so crimes that get reported are more likely to become part of the office record. Improved reporting and record-keeping plus highly selective news reporting have, in turn, helped convince the public that their neighborhoods are more dangerous.”
Having good information, data, and statistics for crime is a good thing. It is important that we have a good and accurate sense of how much crime and violence is taking place in our cities, who is committing the crime, and who tends to be the victims. However, new data reporting and collecting abilities can make it seem like there is more crime than there used to be, simply because we can better collect and report that information. Better collecting and reporting means that news stations can run more stories about crimes that previously would have gone unreported, increasing the prevalence of crime in the news, building the sense of danger that people feel. With broader news reporting and an online news system driven by clicks, we also see more crime that takes place outside our communities, even when browsing local news websites.
This can ultimately have negative effects for society. While it is good to have accurate information, that information can be misleading and misused. Increasing people’s sense of danger for political ends can erode social trust and lead to profiling and dangerous policing policies that have racial disparities. It can lead to disinvestment in areas that people deem dangerous and can limit the interactions that people are willing to have in their communities, furthering disinvestment and reinforcing a sense of danger. Context is the key and is easy to leave out when reporting crime and discussing individual crimes within larger trends. Our recent uptick in crime against a background of misperception could be especially dangerous, with extreme reactions against increases in crimes that may end up being driven by the peculiar circumstances of the Pandemic. We should work to make our cities and communities safer, but we should also work to make sure people have an accurate perception of the safety or danger of their communities.
Voting, Homelessness, and Gentrification

Voting, Homelessness, and Gentrification

Posted on by jabittan
I live in Reno, Nevada, a city that was hit very hard by the Great Recession and has turned around over the last few years with an explosion of gentrification. The city is in a valley between the Sierra Nevada mountains to the west and more smaller ranges to the East. The city is at a point where the valley has been mostly filled in, meaning that any additional urban sprawl will have to take place in valleys outside the main Reno/Sparks area. Consequently, prices have risen in the valley, driven by a limited supply, limited ability to spread, and an influx of new residents from California and neighboring states. At the same time that the city is gentrifying, new developments and new economic programs built on tech and outdoor tourism are changing the local landscapes. New trendy hotels are being built and large hotel casinos are being turned into condominiums and apartments.
Caught-up in the city’s transformation are the homeless shelters. The main area where homeless shelters have been concentrated downtown is transforming into a trendy place with local breweries and new restaurants. It is close to the still somewhat new baseball stadium and is close to an area where the University of Nevada, Reno is currently expanding student housing. This has put pressure on city leaders to clean-up the area, which means pushing out the homeless who have come to know the area as a place where they can find shelter and a meal.
“The very poor are a tiny minority,” writes Christopher Jencks in The Homeless, “and they hardly ever vote. Citizens who want the poor to live as far away as possible are a large majority, and they vote regularly. That leaves the poorest of the poor with nowhere to go.”
This quote from Jencks accurately sums up the current situation regarding the homeless in my home town. Rumos I have heard are that the Gospel Mission my wife and I volunteer at to serve the homeless will have to move and the building it occupies will likely be demolished for new hotels in the near future. I think this is a good economic move for the city, our ballpark, and the area around the stadium. Reno is a town that has always been in the shadow of Las Vegas as a less glitzy, downscale version of sin city. Many people want to reimagine Reno as something better, cleaner, and more attractive to the outside world than a sad version of Vegas. However, our homeless who rely on the shelter and know they can depend on the area for a place to eat and sleep are going to be pushed further away. A new, much larger, homeless shelter was recently built, but it is several miles down the road in a somewhat hard to access part of town next to the busiest freeway interchange. It was people with resources who vote that decided the homeless needed to go and that they would be pushed to one of the least attractive parts of town. The homeless, without any power themselves, certainly didn’t chose to be even further marginalized and outcast from a city that wants to ignore their existence.
Bad Luck, Homelessness, and My Writing

Bad Luck, Homelessness, and My Writing

Posted on by jabittan
In The Homeless Christopher Jencks writes:
“When we try to understand this issue, it helps to remember that if bad luck were the main cause of homelessness, good luck would suffice to end it. Luck is by definition always changing. Thus if bad luck were the main cause of homelessness, most people would be homeless occasionally, but few would be homeless for long. In reality, most people are never homeless, a sizable number are homeless briefly, and a few are homeless for long periods. The long-term homeless are mostly people for whom almost everything imaginable has gone wrong for many years. Many are heavy drug or alcohol users. Many have severe mental disabilities. Even those who do not have such easily labeled problems have the kind of bad luck that recurs over and over, causing them to lose one job after another and one friend after another. …
Sympathetic writers and advocates often dwell on bad luck because they want to convince the public that the homeless are victims of circumstances beyond their control and deserve our help. This strikes me as a myopic strategy. It inspires incredulity among the worldly, and it leads the credulous to underestimate how much help the long-term homeless really need.”
These two paragraphs are a great summation of a lot of my thinking and also serve as a metacommentary on my recent writing about the homeless. When I imagine a homeless person, I generally do believe that numerous factors beyond their control had to exist for them to end up homeless. Even if it can be shown that they made poor choices, have generally been lazy their whole life, and have a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, I don’t think it is entirely fair to place all the blame for homelessness on the individual. I think bad luck, potentially starting by being born to unsupportive parents or being born with genes that make one less likely to succeed (genes contributing to ADHD or increased chances of addiction), can contribute to homelessness far more than good luck can contribute to getting out of homelessness. Still, I think Jencks’ point that those who advocate for better ways of thinking about the homeless can overplay the bad luck argument.
Homelessness is a serious problem that would be incredibly expensive to eliminate across the country. We currently don’t have the manpower to give adequate mental healthcare to everyone who needs it along with subsequent counseling and simple life skills training. We would have to pay all the people who help the homeless adapt to living in their own space. We would likely have to establish some sort of method to provide currently illegal drugs in a safe manner, another costly and complicated set of policies and institutions. It is not just a matter of giving the homeless a handout, it is  a matter of reshaping society and reorganizing our resources – a difficult, time intensive, and resource intensive process that couldn’t be done overnight, or even in a decade.
Some people are homeless for a short stretch due to bad luck, and their experience in homelessness, in terms of support they are or are not offered should not be determined by how we think and feel about the chronically homeless. Some individuals chose homelessness and some simply have no way to escape it at this point, and our policies generally stem from how we think about them. This is a mistake, especially if we want to help those who may fall into homelessness, but could escape it with early interventions. In the effort to bolster support and show that not all homelessness is chronic homelessness, we may overplay the bad luck argument, leading to disappointment when we don’t see changes in the visibly and chronically homeless. The problem is complex, includes different populations with different needs, and is easy to oversimplify arguments surrounding homelessness. Nevertheless, I think the impulse and general feeling of most people is that the homeless are lazy derelicts. I think we overplay the role of personal responsibility in society, and we fail to recognize how much our social responsibilities (or lack thereof) contribute to the problems we see around us. I think we should be honest about the costs, timelines, and effort involved with addressing homelessness, but I still feel that we need to make the argument that homelessness doesn’t happen in individual vacuums and that we shouldn’t simply blame the homeless for being homeless. We can discuss the bad luck that many people face on a path toward homelessness, and we can also address the social responsibility we all have in helping people avoid such deep failures.
On Social Roles

On Social Roles

Posted on by jabittan
My wife is a special education teacher, and she is truly excellent at what she does. She currently works with families with children between the age of 0 and 3 and helps teach them how to raise a child with disabilities or physical/intellectual delays. She is incredibly skilled at what she does, and performs a role for our society that I would be terrible at. I am simply not an infant person. I could learn a lot about them and become good at working with infants and their families, I am sure, but it is not something that would feel natural to me, at least not in the way that it does for my wife. Contrasting her, I am a good writer (in my own opinion at least) and I have a set of skills in working with data and information, in coalition and team building, and in speaking and communication that my wife does not have (she has worked to be good in all these areas, but again, it is more natural for me than her just as working with children with disabilities is more natural for her than me). The kinds of jobs and careers that come naturally to me would be a major challenge for my wife, just as her job would be a major challenge to me. We fill different roles within society based on our individual strengths.
I think about social roles a lot, especially how far back in our evolutionary history our varying social roles could possibly tie back to. In small hunter gatherer tribes, I can imagine people having many overlapping roles, but also many different specialized roles. It would be hard for people to bring children along on certain hunting or gathering expeditions, and that would necessitate a split in terms of social roles. It is natural then that some people who were better skilled at child rearing would watch over children at a central location while others would go off to hunt. This is the most basic presentation of the idea of social roles I can think of, and I recognize that it is probably too simplistic and vulnerable to abuse by those who want to limit women’s rights, but I think it is a helpful starting point to understand how we should think about the roles we all play within society and how our current social expectations of personal responsibility can run against our possibly evolved social roles. [I want to stress that I am not saying men are by default strong hunters and women are by default fragile childcare workers. I don’t see any reason why a spectrum of skills wouldn’t have some men be naturally more inclined to childcare work, cooking, or other typically feminine coded roles with some women more aligned toward hunting, fire fighting, or other typically masculine coded roles.]
In his book The Homeless, Christopher Jencks writes, “In most cases we hold adults responsible for their own actions. But when people are too young, … or [too intellectually disabled], to be held responsible, society has to designate someone else to assume this responsibility. When people’s relatives cannot or will not play this role, society needs to create an institution to act in loco parentis.”
This quote highlights the role of personal responsibility and the conflicts between our social roles and our personal responsibility that can arise in the United States. Not all of us would be great at watching over an assisting a family member or friend who was dealing with severe depression, an addiction, or who had an intellectual disability that prevented them from working. However, for many people in our country, this responsibility is forced on them by a social system that provides minimal support to people with disabilities or who have had mental health challenges. Regardless of the role we are best suited for, sometimes we end up having to care for an elderly loved one with no other person to turn to, or for a spouse facing suicidal thoughts, or for a child dealing with a drug addiction. Not all of us are well positioned to help such individuals, and sometimes those people who need help and support find themselves on the street and on a path toward homelessness when the family around them cannot support them.
That is the warning that Liebow’s quote contains. Without solid institutions (I am not using “institutions” in the sense of a mental institution to warehouse people) we cannot provide the support that people really need. We will force everything into the personal responsibility framework that dominates our society. We force responsibility of others onto family members who may not be well suited to perform that role. The argument is that we need better social systems and structures that ensure that people who need help, whether it is counseling, healthcare treatment for addiction, or life services for those with intellectual disabilities along with assistance for their supporting families is necessary in order to reduce and potentially eliminate homelessness. We cannot solve our problem by continuing to heap greater responsibilities onto the shoulders of those who are not well suited or positioned to bear such responsibilities. Those who do manage to support people in our existing system deserve praise, but those who fail don’t fail entirely on their own. Their failure is a social failure, reflecting the over-reliance of personal responsibility in our society and the unreasonable demands such a system can place upon people who don’t have the right skills and abilities to handle such daunting challenges.
The Last Hired, The First Fired

The Last Hired, The First Fired

Posted on by jabittan
In the United States our economic system is more or less a meritocratic system. It is not a perfect meritocracy (we all know someone who got a job because of a parent or well connected uncle rather than their skills), but for the most part, hard working people are able to get promoted based on their effort, talent, and skills. If you deserve an opportunity to advance you can normally find an avenue forward, even if it is winding and has some setbacks along the way. For most of us this works to our advantage and helps keep our economy, universities, and public institutions moving forward. But for the homeless people in our society, this turns into a crushing system that doesn’t provide second chances.
“The homeless are clearly the last hired and the first fired,” writes Christopher Jencks in his book The Homeless. Our system of meritocracy awards the hard working and those who are willing to show up early, stay late, and put on a smile in the face of upset customers. Homeless people often have trouble on all of these fronts, partly due to the very nature of their homelessness. They may not have good transportation to a job, making it hard to be early. If they have to be in a shelter by a certain time or risk losing their spot, then they cannot stay late on a job. The stress, anxiety, and disrespect of homelessness often makes it hard for the homeless to have good people skills, meaning they have trouble with performance on the low-wage jobs available to them.
On top of this, being homeless itself is a ding against someone in our meritocratic system. The homeless are seen as defective, so even if someone sets out to be hard working and courteous on a job where they have the right skill set for success, they start further behind everyone else. They are only offered a job when no other employees could be found. Starting behind everyone else means they have more ground to cover to catch up and be seen on par with everyone else. They are constantly under more scrutiny. This makes them vulnerable to being fired even if they are trying hard and doing well. When work is slow and layoffs happen, the homeless are often easily justified as the first fired in our meritocracy.
Any system is going to have shortcomings and the systems of meritocracy in our workplace are no exception. Most of us can do well in meritocratic institutions, but outliers on the extreme ends, the hyper-wealthy and the homeless, don’t have the same experiences in a meritocracy as the majority of us. The homeless can’t get a good start in a meritocratic system, and are penalized before they even try to begin.  I would argue that we need a universal jobs guarantee to ensure that the homeless can find some type of work to do, even if it is ultimately menial and meaningless, to help them get a foothold and avoid being the last hired and first fired from any job they try to maintain. Guaranteeing we can get everyone some type of paid work will enable the poor to find a benefit in participating in our meritocracy rather than being a left-out extremity.
55% of Chicago Homeless Looked Neat and Clean

55% of Chicago Homeless Looked Neat & Clean

Posted on by jabittan
If I pictured a homeless person in my mind I would imagine someone who was dirty, who may not have a shirt, and who had a mess of overgrown and ungroomed hair. Whether male or female, ragged clothes, unkempt hair, and bags full of stuff seems to be the typical image of a homeless person. However, there are many homeless people, perhaps even a majority in some cities at some times, who do not fit the stereotypical image of a homeless person.
In The Homeless Christopher Jencks writes about our expectations of what homelessness looks like, and what the reality of homeless often is for those experiencing homelessness. Regarding our expectations, he writes, “but appearances can mislead us … When [Peter] Rossi surveyed the Chicago homeless, his interviewers classified 55 percent of the people they interviewed as neat and clean rather than dirty, unkempt, or shabbily dressed.”
We don’t expect people who wear normal and clean clothes to be homeless. We don’t expect people who are generally well groomed and don’t smell bad to be homeless. But when Peter Rossi was writing his book Down and Out in America, a slight majority of people interviewed were dressed more or less normally and appeared to be typical people. These individuals are part of the group generally referred to as the invisible homeless. Rather than the visible people sleeping in tents who can’t shave, can’t shower, and have a few dirty possessions, these people appeared normal, but still didn’t have a home. They were missed and misunderstood in the debates and discussions of homeless people. They often hid their homelessness from the people they interacted with, creating space for the misperceptions about homelessness.
I think it is important to compare our stereotypical view of homelessness to the reality of homelessness for many people. When we see the visibly homeless we often have strong reactions, and those strong reactions generally dictate how we think the homeless should be handled. But those strong reactions and opinions fail to account for the kind of homelessness that perhaps a majority experience. This means that policies and programs to help the homeless (or more nefariously “address” the homeless) may fail to actually benefit the majority of homeless or to even focus on the leading drivers of homelessness. If someone who is neat and clean is in line at a soup kitchen, or asking for aid, they may not seem like they need it because they don’t look like the typical homeless person. Or, if we deny assistance to the homeless because we think they are all dirty, lazy, and possibly on drugs, then we fail to help those homeless who are trying to look and appear normal, who are tying to keep a job while homeless, and who are trying not to fall into the ungroomed stereotype of the homeless. It is important that we are aware of our expectations, biases, and prejudices around the homeless so that we can develop an accurate understanding of homelessness in our nation to actually address the problem.
When to Stop Counting

When to Stop Counting

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about the idea of scientific versus political numbers. Scientific numbers are those that we rely on for decision-making. They are not always better and more accurate numbers than political numbers, but they are generally based on some sort of standardized methodology and have a concrete and agreed upon backing to them. Political numbers are more or less guestimates or are formed from sources that are not confirmed to be reliable. While they can end up being more accurate than scientific figures they are harder to accept and justify in decision-making processes. In the end, the default is scientific numbers, but scientific numbers do have a flaw that keeps them from ever becoming what they proport to be. How do we know when it is time to stop counting and when we are ready to move forward with a scientific number rather than fall back on a political number?
Christopher Jencks explores this idea in his book The Homeless by looking at a survey conducted by Martha Burt at the Urban Institute. Jencks writes, “Burt’s survey provides quite a good picture of the visible homeless. It does not tell us much about those who avoid shelters, soup kitchens, and the company of other homeless individuals. I doubt that such people are numerous, but I can see no way of proving this. It is hard enough finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It is far harder to prove that a haystack contains no more needles.” The quote shows that Burt’s survey was good at identifying the visibly homeless people, but that at some point in the survey a decision was made to stop attempting to count the less visibly homeless. It is entirely reasonable to stop counting at a certain point, as Jencks mentions it is hard to prove there are no more needles left to count, but that always means there will be a measure of uncertainty with your counting and results. Your numbers will always come with a margin of error because there is almost no way to be certain that you didn’t miss something.
Where we chose to stop counting can influence whether we should consider our numbers to be scientific numbers or political numbers. I would argue that the decision for where to stop our count is both a scientific and a political decision itself. We can make political decisions to stop counting in a way that deliberately excludes hard to count populations. Alternatively, we can continue our search to expand the count and change the end results of our search. Choosing how scientifically accurate to be with our count is still a political decision at some level.
However, choosing to stop counting can also be a rational and economic decision. We may have limited funding and resources for our counting, and be forced to stop at a reasonable point that allows us to make scientifically appropriate estimates about the remaining uncounted population. Diminishing marginal returns to our counting efforts also means at a certain point we are putting in far more effort into counting relative to the benefit of counting one more item for any given survey. This demonstrates how our numbers can be based on  scientific or political motivations, or both. These are all important considerations for us whether we are the counter or studying the results of the counting. Where we chose to stop matters, and because we likely can’t prove we have found every needle in the haystack, and that no more needles exist. No matter what, we will have to face the reality that the numbers we get are not perfect, no matter how scientific we try to make them.
Political and Scientific Numbers

Political and Scientific Numbers

Posted on by jabittan
I am currently reading a book about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the author has recently been comparing the development of textile mills, steam engines, and chemical production in Britain in the 1800’s to the same developments on the European continent. It is clear that within Britain the developments of new technologies and the adoption of larger factories to produce more material was much quicker than on the continent, but exactly how much quicker is hard to determine. One of the biggest challenges is finding reliable and accurate information to compare the number of textile factories, the horse power of steam engines, or how many chemical products were exported in a given decade. In the 1850s getting good data and preserving that data for historians to sift through and analyze a couple of hundred years later was not an easy task. Many of the numbers that the author has referenced are generalized estimates and ranges, not well defined statistical figures. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the data are not useful and cannot help us understand general trends of the industrial revolution in Britain and the European continent.
Our ability to obtain and store numbers, information, and data is much better today than in the 1800s, but that doesn’t mean that all of our numbers are now perfect and that we have everything figured out. Sometimes our data comes from pretty reliable sources, like the GPS map data on Strava that gives us an idea of where lots of people like to exercise and where very few people exercise. Other data is pulled from surveys which can be unreliable or influenced by word choice and response order. Some data comes from observational studies that might be flawed in one way or another. Other data may just be incomplete, from small sample sizes, or simply messy and hard to understand. Getting good information out of such data is almost impossible. As the saying goes, garbage in – garbage out.
Consequently we end up with political numbers and scientific numbers. Christopher Jencks wrote about the role that both have played in how we understand and think about homelessness in his book The Homeless. He writes, “one needs to distinguish between scientific and political numbers. This distinction has nothing to do with accuracy. Scientific numbers are often wrong, and political numbers are often right. But scientific numbers are accompanied by enough documentation so you can tell who counted what, whereas political numbers are not.”
It is interesting to think about the accuracy (or perhaps inaccuracy) of the numbers we use to understand our world. Jencks explains that censuses of homeless individuals need to be conducted early in the morning or late at night to capture the full number of people sleeping in parks or leaving from/returning to overnight shelters. He also notes the difficulty of contacting people to confirm their homeless status and the challenges of simply surveying people by asking if they have a home. People use different definitions of having a home, being homeless, or having a fixed address and those differences can influence the count of how many homeless people live within a city or state. The numbers are backed by a scientific process, but they may be inaccurate and not representative of reality. By contrast, political numbers could be based on a random advocate’s average count of meals provided at a homeless shelter or by other estimates. These estimates may end up being just as accurate, or more so, than the scientific numbers used, but how the numbers are used and understood can be very different.
Advocacy groups, politicians, and concerned citizens can use non-scientific numbers to advance their cause or their point of view. They can rely on general estimates to demonstrate that something is or is not a problem. But they can’t necessarily drive actual action by governments, charities, or private organizations with only political numbers. Decisions look bad when made based on rough guesses and estimates. They look much better when they are backed by scientific numbers, even if those numbers are flawed. When it is time to actually vote, when policies have to be written and enacted, and when a check needs to be signed, having some sort of scientific backing to a number is crucial for self-defense and for (at least an attempt at) rational thinking.
Today we are a long way off from the pen and paper (quill and scroll?) days of the 1800s. We have the ability to collect far more data than we could have ever imagined, but the numbers we end up with are not always that much better than rough estimates and guesses. We may use the data in a way that shows that we trust the science and numbers, but the information may ultimately be useless. These are some of the frustrations that so many people have today with the ways we talk about politics and policy. Political numbers may suggest we live in one reality, but scientific numbers may suggest another reality. Figuring out which is correct and which we should trust is almost impossible, and the end result is confusion and frustration. We probably solve this with time, but it will be a hard problem that will hang around and worsen as misinformation spreads online.