I struggled to find a good header for the blog. As some of you might have noticed, I put up severally cheesy composite images for which I was justifiably berated. I could not think what to put, but Lorena rescued me again. She suggested El Cerro de la Silla, the most distinctive landmark in the beautiful city of Lorena’s birth, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon Mexico. In the header (and the picture with this post), Lorena’s parents live very close to bottom right corner of the photo with the mountain rising behind them. Cerro really means “hill”. The literal translation for El Cerro de la Silla is The Hill of the Saddle or Saddle Hill. If that “hill” were in North Carolina it would definitely be called Saddle Mountain. It’s height is 5,971 feet. For now, it is just the right choice for a blog header.
Day: April 28, 2013
Day 615 of 1000
Kelly’s enthusiasm for all things statistical and a discussion with her yesterday inspired me to look back through a few articles from The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal. I found a great article that describes why I think the higher education system in America generally fails many Humanities and Social Science students. Most of them do not have the skills to properly evaluate many conclusions based on statistics and mathematics. Of course, there are significant exceptions. Rodney Stark, about whom I have written in the past, is also a numbers guy1. Stark’s research and conclusions are driven by numbers. His research does not lead to a priori conclusions based on the current Zeitgiest. Rather, he lets number tell their own story, records the results, and makes conclusions based on those results. It does not hurt that he writes about really interesting stuff and has an accessible and engaging writing style.
I recommend you read the whole article, but here is a quote that describes the problem:
In the latest study, Kimmo Eriksson, a mathematician and researcher of social psychology at Sweden’s Mälardalen University, chose two abstracts from papers published in research journals, one in evolutionary anthropology and one in sociology. He gave them to 200 people to rate for quality—with one twist. At random, one of the two abstracts received an additional sentence, the one above with the math equation, which he pulled from an unrelated paper in psychology. The study’s 200 participants all had master’s or doctoral degrees. Those with degrees in math, science or technology rated the abstract with the tacked-on sentence as slightly lower-quality than the other. But participants with degrees in humanities, social science or other fields preferred the one with the bogus math, with some rating it much more highly on a scale of 0 to 100.
One of the features of a “Liberal education” classically defined is that it values a wide breadth of knowledge. Early on, that meant that mathematicians and physicists were required to have as deep a knowledge of literature and history as possible while historians and literature students were required to have as deep a knowledge of mathematics and physics as possible. It seems like this is not valued as much as it was in the pass both the hard and soft sciences have suffered for it. If a Humanities graduate or Social Scientist believes a paper is better solely because it has a cryptic looking equation in it, even if the equation is bogus, that idea certainly seems to be vindicated.
1. Full disclosure: I read every Rodney Stark book I can get my hands on and am pretty much a Rodney Stark fanboy.