Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

14 Calling to Account 211
ways of thought that extend beyond the European inheritance and with a realisation,
in the process, of a distinctively American possibility of being. Heidegger for sure
would be horrified, and yet this anticipates, and in some ways exceeds, so much of
what he said.
In the end Thoreau is simply practical. Amongst the townsfolk of Concord there
are rumours of the extraordinary depth of Walden Pond, with fantastic stories about
what can be seen in the winter if a hole is bored through the ice. Certainly Thoreau’s
accounts of the pond express a kind of enchantment. But in response to the rumours
he rows a boat out and lowers a plumb line. The depth, he records, is 125 m.
14.4
Let us return to our opening office scene. If we imagine Fibbs today, it is not only the
case that we can scarcely envisage the kind of confrontation with a shop steward that
Pinter’s sketch ironically adapts: it is also that we cannot think of him delighting in
the factory’s products. Even his workers are likely in many respects to be insulated
from the things they are making by the black-box technology that governs so much
of what they do. The poetry of Fibbs’ work must now be located elsewhere. 5 While
the technical names of machine parts once tripped off his tongue, he is now more
likely to delight in his proficiency in marketing speak (given ethereal substance by
Powerpoint) and in his familiarity and facility with the spreadsheets, bar charts, and
flow diagrams that he will confidently gloss. Statistics will figure prominently in
this.
The purpose of the present book is to consider the ethics and aesthetics of
statistics. Statistics are present in our lives today in unprecedented ways, and they
intrude insistently and in some ways insidiously into our modes of accounting for
ourselves. In the process they hold a peculiar fascination, and it is helpful to understand
this in aesthetic terms. Thus, there is a kind of poetic appeal for the sports
enthusiast—similarly, no doubt, for the trader in the money markets (or even, one
hesitates to make the comparison, for those who excitedly track the UK Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE))—in the recording of numerical data of performance.
This is plainly evident in the banners of statistics that accompany, for example a
televised rugby match, which show the percentage of possession, the ratio of successful
and unsuccessful conversion attempts, the number of tries, and so on. The
examples proliferate, of course, through the various ways we govern ourselves. The
key point here is the prominence of numbers in various forms.
Can anything more specific be said about the nature of this appeal? Here I would
like to risk a number of suggestions.
In the first place, it is common to look to statistics to reveal ‘underlying trends’,
as though there were a hidden reality to which the statistics might point. This is a
complex kind of reification. There is a formal appeal, which is redolent of a certain
strain of Platonism, coupled with the kind of atomism that was mentioned above. 6
What is at issue here is not the predictive power of statistics, whose value in medical