STS3301 Paper Week 5
Responses to Readings, week 5, The Taming of Chance, for STS 3301
For the past three months, I have been reading, in fits and starts, Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit. Ian Hacking's book not only uses a phrase from Little Dorrit, "Circumlocution Office," it is as difficult to read for its braided windings, multitude of characters, and frequent asides. (It is unfortunate that Hacking makes little use of well-constructed sentences as did the great Victorian writers.) Also, Dickens' sense of the law from Bleak House is repeated at the end of page 86 as Hacking sets up chapter 11, that law is the place where an individual is no longer an individual, but a case to be decided or sometimes left for another time to be decided properly. I suppose Dickens is widely considered a trusted reporter of the 19th century. So, I wasn't too surprised to see Theodore Porter citing Dickens also. [p. 177]
By Porter's description of Henry James Brooke, I am reminded of a definition of scientific pursuit of "truth" I proposed in our week 1 or 2 discussion, that it is the seeking of more precision. The weight society assigned to Brooke seems to have been associated with the exacting precision of his work. As the idea of a constant is starting to take shape in physical science in the 19th century, and it is sought by the electro-magnetists above all, the 19th century political efforts are running parallel and assuming the same cachet. Porter gives us Thomas Rowe Edmonds, who seems to seek universal constants of life expectancy. [p. 179] I wonder whether we have these ideas published then for our perusal now because of the central feelings of people like Edmonds, or because those expressions were demanded, selected, and published by a society as hungry for such claims of precision and universality as it was previously for a looking glass only with something scientific of Boyle's attached. Such a hunger to be a polymath about everything may be expressed in my favorite book, George Eliot's Middlemarch, by Mr. Arthur Brooke, who is ever misquoting the classics as well as all modern and reformist thinkers he can think of.
I was interested to see that the same analysts we know from the history of mathematical physics appear in Hacking's retelling of so many fights to put a number on juries, namely Condorcet, Laplace, and friends.
But Porter points out that the faith in precision did not come from within the elite of actuaries, like a Kuhnian revolution. He shows it coming from politics and the law, who are beginning to ask "Are you sure?" of actuary tables. [p. 174]
Porter also recounts a sense of the norm and deviancy from it, in a Dr. Chambers. [pp. 178-9] Insurers convinced themselves that normal numbers supplied about a patient were more reliable than qualitative, wordy testimony.
Porter and Hacking both point to statistician Farr connecting physical science and human analysis, or moral analysis--Guerry's phrase for using correlating morals and important human outcomes using statistics. [Porter, p. 179; Hacking, p. 53; Hacking, p. 78]
Hacking uses the phrase "avalanche of numbers" many times, discussing both the cry for more data and the processing of more data as it comes. But I see irony there, too much irony to be satisfied with the avalanche hypothesis, tellingly in the difference between the Prussian approach and the "western" approach. The irony is between that expansion and the statistical attempt at reductionism. The "madness" of the taming of chance is the expectation that more measuring won't just give more numbers, that it will give clearer laws. In a sense, science, through its agents, being astronomers and physical mathematicians, misled other professions to try to attain a higher level of understanding through dogged work on numbers; instead of achieving the clarity of a planet's position, we see the other professions driven in self-obscuring circles by the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings, Dickens' family names for those who exercised their power in the Circumlocution office by sitting on their hands and large stacks of papers. The Prussian approach to statistics was to amass a set of data to determine an integral sum of the power of a kingdom, while the Belgian-and-westward approach seems to have been to reduced a set of data to a mean, define that as a norm, with the addition in the case of new actuary-computers to tack on the idea of a standard deviation assignable to a difference in premiums. Sort of a "200 channels and still nothing useful on TV" idea. Taming of Avalanche might have been a better title. Maxwell's "physical hypothesis" is echoed by the organists like FJV Broussais who decided that when they couldn't measure something, they would make a physical hypothesis and run with it until they had better data. For Broussais et al., the hypothesis was that the cause or seat of the deviance was an errant organ or tissue. [Hacking, p. 70]
