Tag: human nature

Why I Love “A Word on Statistics”

by hkatz, posted in Readings

The poem, which you can read at the Poetry Foundation, starts with:

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:

fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:

almost all the rest.

– from “A Word on Statistics” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak

I’ve been revisiting Szymborksa’s poem over the past year, and I like it for multiple reasons:

  • Her poem offers a strange comfort. Partly, it’s the dark comfort of thinking, “We’re all doomed together.” But it’s also the comfort of connection with other people.
  • It’s a poem that helps make me more patient.
  • Even though statistics are impersonal, and this poem isn’t about any one person in particular, it still feels deeply human and personal.
  • The poem inspires compassion. Statistics often desensitize (remember this quote attributed without evidence to Stalin?), but this poem does the opposite. It makes you keenly sensitive to people: what they face, what they do, how they fail themselves and others, how they inspire.
  • There’s sorrow in the poem, because we’re a sorry lot. The poem helps make the sorrow more bearable.
  • It captures some of the limitations of statistics, including the imprecision. There’s a lot that’s unquantifiable about us.

Psychology’s checkered past

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Research

The experiments mentioned in 10 Psychological Experiments that Went Horribly Wrong are more complex (and darker) than how they’re portrayed in the article, which also doesn’t give a full account of the rationale behind some of them and what conclusions we can draw from them.

But the article is still worth a look, to get a sense of the kinds of unethical cruel decisions made by experimenters and doctors, the poor experimental designs of their studies, and the way that human nature can often turn ugly really fast.

In their bid to capture, quantify or control some of our most fundamental qualities – love, cruelty, craving for approval, sexual identity, fear, power and submission – these experimenters usually didn’t account for how messy people can be (and how easy it is to let power over others go to your head).