David Warren does not trust “the numbers” (and I think he’s quite right to doubt):
At some point — but it is seldom a discrete moment in space or time — the weight of the anecdotal in science, or that of the circumstantial in law, becomes overwhelming. This is the opposite of a statistical fact, in part because there are no statistical facts. I am reminded of this whenever the “scientific” control freaks of statistics lay down some law, indifferent to the Law in nature. The difference between 999,999 and one million is, in any imaginable situation, not a difference at all. Where it is made the basis for a decision, that decision is arbitrary, and not infrequently, cruel. By contrast, such differences as those between pregnant and not pregnant, dead and not dead, are unchallengeably significant. They are in the realm of meaning.
I am reminded of this hourly or better, these days, when consulting the news. All readers of the mass media (accurately described by Trump as “fake news”) are being covered, constantly, by the vomit of statistics — few with any context, and many knowingly false. They “look scientific,” which is to say, they answer to the moron’s conception of science. In “disciplines” like economics, today, and throughout the other social sciences, the participants sleepwalk. Nobel prizes are given out for numerical sludge, presented to the purpose of selling one destructive “policy” or another, that will be imposed on real, live, particular human beings. The same is true of the “mathematical biology” that has disinformed all our public health “professionals.”
The Red Chinese Batflu, now transforming our world, is a spectacular case in point. Not only the epidemiological projections, but even the counts of dead and wounded, are taken on faith — from people who are characteristically faithless. Information on prevention and cures is hostage to the work of statisticians. “Double blind tests,” which would be absolutely immoral — wicked — on human subjects facing life or death — are demanded by our medical apes.
