Week 5 - The Theoretical statistician

Mathematics is a beautiful language – it reveals the patterns in nature, in society intricately webbed together. Statistics is a one of the dialects of this language – it focuses on quantifiable observable or perceivable characteristics (something you can perceive with your senses and your mind) and reveals their patterns and meanings for the present and (more powerfully) projected to the future.

Taking a 180 degree turn therefore to sociology and the erroneously perceived ‘soft’ side of knowledge would at first seem odd to my circle of influence. But it takes very few steps to see this other side.

You see, we see patterns and order with the bias of how we perceive and understand the world. Therefore for a westernized perception the rising and setting of the sun indicated time and was mapped as such. In many oriental communities the daily count of time was less meaningful to life – it was the changing of seasons (raining season, harvest season, flood season, famine season) that was curated from the observation of the rising and setting of the sun. A mathematician therefore in these two worlds would end up collecting very different sets of data associated to the same pattern of the sun!

Mathematics, Statistics, Numbers do not exist in a vacuum – Yes ‘1’ is ‘1’ north south east or west – but the meaning of 1 is influenced by how we understand and make meaning of life within the society (sociology).

Mathematics presents clean and net rigid formulas to capture and explain reality. But the formulas were created in a certain historical and geographical context– and contexts evolve. The square peg formulas are too rigid to evolve. As the homo economicus setup of the formula world becomes increasingly heterogeneous, the mismatch between what the formulas say and the lived reality grows and eventually there is a crack – a rejection of the misfit formulas - a paradigm shift. A search for new way of thinking that better fits.

We have to revisit the thinking/ backbone behind the economic formula – the theoretical framework. Invariably we have to re-look at the history of the economic ideas, critique it with our lived realities and then re-calibrate new formulas that better support our lived realities.