Funny funny funny...but kinda sad

I was in a used bookstore the other day and stumbled across a very funny book that i couldn't resist. "Born to rebel: birth order, family dynamics, and creative lives." The title gives away almost the entire book. It's a statistical look at which children are more likely to express certain characteristics based on when they were born. For example youngest children are often most radical.

Wait what?

So that means my little brother Dennis is supposed to be more radical then Margery or i? That doesn't make a whole pile of sense, i know he's young and there's room for improvement but so far i think he's the most conservative out of the three children. So we'll wait an see but what about me and Margery...what are we SUPPOSED to be like? Well eldest children are supposed to be the most conservative (rriiight...) and middle children are the least militaristic and/or violent. Hmmm, i'm the middle child and i think i am the only one that has considered a career in the military, participated in violent sports, gotten in a fight, ar supported any kind of paramillitary revolution.

Me thinks the authors conclusions are a little bit weak.

The book goes on and makes more silly claims which i mostly disagree with but those don't realy matter. What i finally got out of the book after thumbing through the meatier parts was that this entire project was based on looking at the data and drawing conclusions from it. This put me in a bit of sticky situation because for the first time i realised that i have switched my posistion on this subject. When it dawned on me that this is what the book was doing (drawing conclusions from data) my knee jerk response was "this is all wrong, they're putting the cart before the horse."...

No they're not, that is the way scientific method is supposed to work, observe and comment. So how did i get to a point in my life where i think that we should make an arguement and THEN back it up with staistics? Am i justified in this new mind set? when did it come about?

I think on of the main reasons for my change of heart is a aquired distrust of numbers. My dad used to say "figures don't lie, but liers do figure." Which i laughed at and used as a grain of salt when listening to politicians. But gradually that saying started applying to a lot more things in life. To work and pop culture and books and hockey and as i became exposed to more and more of these numbers i also started to learn how they worked. Where exactly do you find a statistic on such and such, how did they make such and such a graph. Not to go into the details bu the final word is statistics are a croc of shit.

So i guess the keystone of my objection is treating a pseduscience as a real science. Treating these flimsy decietful numbers as omething reliable sources of information. That's not to say i trust real science but thats a much more involved discusion.

Some people will argue that this comes off a little bit hypocritical because i used to be the stat-king in arguements and still do love to throw a good quote in here and there in my current writings. How come i use something that i have such obvious contempt and disregard for? I think, because they still have a use. I like to think of them as that little paper umbrella on your drink. You can get by with out it, but it maks it that little bit nicer. It completes something thats already there, puts it in perspective.

You can have a good drink without an umbrella, but if you try to put an umbrella in a glass of water and call it a good drink...i will not be impressed with you.