Existentiële gedachten over Statistiek

Existentialisme and Statistics. Logics are an useful tool for philosophy. But at the same time we must be aware that life is more than can be explained by logics alone. There are especially irrational decisions of laws: the governing ideas behind text and jurisdiction give ultimately the possibility to take a decision. Even in mathematics, approximations based on a sound feeling, are indispensable. Sartre, in his philosophy, trying to explain the reality of life, felt the same difficulty: with logics the problems of life remained in darkness. In his works one sees the human being in the world who has to meet hostile forces. The sage grows is mental strength, connected with all other men. For Sartre these hostile forces are formed by the power over life and death (birth control and gun). A decision in a problem of life may be irrational, but the sage man takes a decision without restriction. Hesitation is cowardice and laziness. So the modern statistics have to face many hostile forces. Modern statistics, which try to give a full quantative knowledge of life in its different aspects of national accounts, econometric analysis, sampling and complexes of more or less individual statistics, have to give information and guidance to studies and politics of science, government and enterprise. The statistics carefully prepared by the statistician in his office become part of the struggle for life of nations, enterprises and individuals. Will these statistics stand this severe trial, bearing in mind that practically all figures are more or less biassed? A figure which promises to give more than it can actually do is contrary to the statistical conscience. It asks for clarification. This is stated clearly by Boulding: “The whole problem of the proper treatment of spatial political aggregates is of great interest and much work needs to be done on it…aggregates are no reality…the significance of averages depends on frequency of distribution, …it must not be thought that aggregative thinking is without danger…”etc. So the statistician has to face the same problem as the extentialist. The statistician will have to look after the deepest values of statistics and to use the still hidden forces in it, seeing statistics as part of reality and connected with it with many visible and invisible strings. As the extentialism had to surmount many prejudices, so the statistician has now to surmount many old‐time statistical practices to build up a new set of statistics which will be strong enough to stand the hostile forces of the users who find one or more figures useless for their special purpose, though they ought to know the restricted possibilities of the figure used. This can be fatal for statistics, unless statistics give as much as possible a good picture of reality for which reorientation is wanted, while, if necessary, a statistician must have the courage to refuse a weak figure.