Again, in a ship, if a man were at liberty to do what he chose, but were devoid of mind and excellence in navigation (αρετης κυβερνητικης), do you perceive what must happen to him and his fellow sailors?
Plato • Alcibiades, 135A
Re: Michael Harris
Statistics were originally the data that a ship of state needed for stationkeeping and staying on course. The Founders of the United States, like the Cybernauts of the Enlightenment they were, engineered a ship of state with checks and ballasts and error-controlled feedbacks to achieve the bicameral purpose of representing both reality and the will of the people. And Max Weber understood that a state’s accounting systems were intended as representations of realities that its crew and passengers must observe or perish.
The question for today is —
- What are the forces that distort our representations of what’s observed, what’s expected, and what’s intended?
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