The Cynic Express(ed) 1.04: Statistical Ethics

     According to a Cosmopolitan poll, fifty-four percent of married women respondents said that they fooled around--cheated on their husbands. A poll by Playboy magazine showed that by age 50, almost sixty-five percent of the respondents had had affairs (1). Adultery is the moral evil that makes me clench my teeth and my fists the most of all, but that is not the subject of this week's column.

     Thirty-three percent of Americans cannot list a freedom protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution (2). Fifty percent of American adults cannot tell you how long the earth takes to orbit the sun (3). Of course, I am not going to go off on the lackadaisical attitude Americans take to their education these days again.

     What I am taking issue with is the prevalence of statistics in society and the possible effects.

     Of course, we have to understand that statistics are often undermined by their sources and their context. Cosmopolitan and Playboy readers reflect only a segment of the populace, the magazines' target market. Written by, for, and about people with a sense of sexual morals more lax than, say, the entire state of Kansas. The shock value of their numbers is minimal and titillating, whereas harbingers of educational doom ring the bell in the town square for new funding for their particular remedy. When I start to take the simple numbers too seriously, I hearken back to a survey that revealed that, although eighty-two percent of respondents (who didn't even watch the X-Files) thought the government was covering up evidence of aliens' visiting Earth, only forty-five percent of the very same respondents said they believed that intelligent life existed on other planets (4). In addition to the plus-or-minus allotted for statistical error, I am inclined to factor in the extra plus-or-minus -thirty-seven-percent stupid factor.

     More dangerous is that the simple number-crunching does not distinguish between prescription and description. For all its glory, and all of its achievements, and even its simple purity of is/is-not black-and-white, science can only describe what exists. The description of the existence of a behavior does not get into the ought of things, which is the realm of philosophers and theologians everywhere. Some people will accept these numbers as prescriptions or encapsulated and gel-capped rationalizations for behavior they engage in and often call "normal" (i.e., practiced by a majority of the people) . After all, it is much easier to sleep at night (often times with someone other than one's spouse) when one remembers that everyone does it. Or at least sixty-five percent of the populace.

     So tonight I will not stumble into the greater scheme of oughts and ought-nots, of prescriptions and proscriptions and the ways people deal with people that comprise the greater tapestry of morals. I will, however, tangent upon those oughts to say that we ought not use statistics to describe our individual behavior. Statistics describe what some people have done and not what we will, or should do.

     And if you remain unconvinced, keep in mind that almost eighteen percent of the human race will watch Baywatch this week (5). That's enough to get me to swear off statistics for life.

1. Compiled in The Big Black Book, published by Boardroom Classics, Greenwich CT, 1997. Page 35 for those of you who want to look it up.
2. The Newseum in Arlington, Virginia.
3. According to the Chicago Academy of Sciences.
4. Survey in USA Today, July 7, 1997
5. The Baywatch Production Company in LA. Who else would care?