Statistics are only meaningful to the extent that people can identify the phenomenon being measured, come up with sensible measurement scales to measure primary or secondary observable phenomena, and then interpret the results and display them in a lucid fashion. Oftentimes that's too much to ask, and our world is now crumbling under the load of heaps of pointless incomprehensible statistics. Increasingly, we are trying to understand the world around us via numbers.
To this end, a host of research centers and organizations now annually release rankings on issues ranging from corruption to democracy to freedom of press. These rankings are then featured on prime real estate across media and used in homilies, laudatory notes, and everything in between, to buttress indefensible claims and to bring a sense of "objectivity" to a media saturated with rants of crazed morons.
"Lost in translation" are subtleties of data, methods of data collection and of analysis, and the caveats. Often what remains are savaged numbers that peddle whatever theory you want them to hawk. The field of social science has been revolutionized in the recent decades with "positivist" approaches using statistics dominating the field. The rise in importance of "numbers" in research is not incidental for numbers provide powerful new ways, particularly statistics, to analyze concepts.
Today numbers are used to understand everything from democracy to emotions. But how do we go about measuring things and assigning number to the thing we haven't yet even been able to define, much less explain? Let me narrow my focus to creation, interpretation, and usage of rankings to substantiate the problems with using statistics.
Rankings
Reporters Sans Frontiers (Reporters without Borders and henceforth called RSF) came out with its annual "Worldwide Press Freedom Rankings". The latest rankings place USA at 53, along with Botswana and Tonga, India at 105, while Jamaica and Liberia are ranked 26 and 83 respectively. The top ranked South Asian country in the rankings is Bhutan at 98. Intuitively, the rankings don't make any sense and a little digging into RSF's methodology for compiling these rankings explains why.
Media's fascination with rankings
The rankings received wide attention and made it to the front pages of countless newspapers. There is a reason why rankings are the choice nourishment of media starved of any "real information". Numbers capture, or so it is thought, a piece of "objective" information about the "reality". Their usage is buoyed by the fact that rankings are seductively simple and easy to interpret. Everyone seems to intuitively know the difference between first and second. All that needs to be done is present the fluff, the requisite shock and horror and the article is written.
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Article comments
1 - Joan Hunt
For such a complex subject, you certainly made this all the more understandable for the average person. Well done!