The perils of being a statistician general are never ending
Pali Lehohla WALTER Radermacher, Germany’s erstwhile chief statistician and former director general of Eurostat, the EU statistical agency, writes: “Statistical facts and the decisions based on them are not two separate worlds, but are in a complex relationship with each other”.
As a statistical community, we tend to avoid these difficult realities instead of dealing with them also in a scientific way.
What the “Économie des Conventions” and scholars like Alain Desrosières or Theodore Porter teach us is that the danger of political influence increases with the relevance of statistical facts for political decisions.
For example, in his book, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, Desrosières writes about the philosophical reasoning of statistics.
While…
