All About Myself: How we Became the Sum of Statistics (Essays, no. 5)

The essay under discussion is by E. B. White, "About Myself" (1945). It is a parody, and yet more than a parody: it is an incisive account of how we came to trust in numbers, indeed how statistics came to dominate the very conception of social and political life. The essay suggests how we can to inhabit an enumerative world.

[@atulitsingh7861]

Indeed, Professor. In the study of business and commerce, in comparison to soft data there seems to be an over-reliance on hard data. In the University of Delhi, it is commonplace to be not as respected if you do not teach a "practical paper", by which they mean, a paper which has numbers and formulas. In contrast, if you are teaching papers that have scant presence of numbers, and mostly concerned with theorising, you may be looked down on as it is assumed by others that teaching theory is as simple a task as any.

[@matthewcagle2315]

I feel like this is sort of a component of the broader modern world's obsession with attempting to measure and label everything which would also include trying categorize people's personalities with systems like Myer's Briggs, or attempting to measure things like women's rights, or democracy in any given country that you really cannot condense into a single number. I do think enumeration does have value to be clear but people take them to have more value than they do, & are to some extent dehumanizing.

[@wonderfacts7782]

Whatsoever, I have got your number 😅. It's a lovely reading. Thank you.

[@negimanu8362]

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