Doctora Malka Older: I like this (from Berman, Elizabeth Popp & Daniel Hirschman “The Sociology of Quantification: Where Are We Now?” Contemporary Sociology, 47.3 2018) b/c we do forget about the work that goes into numbers, which contributes to their perception as neutral @epopppp.bsky.social

my predictive fictions course (syllabus has been slightly updated from this but not much) is starting again today so I'm going to start slowly bringing over my threads about the modules from the other place, maybe with some additional commentary if it occurs to me

Syllabus: Predictive Fictionsmalkaolder.wordpress.com GTD 598 syllabus Public ASU GTD 598 Spring A 2020Predictive Fictions: Stories About The Future Dr. Malka Older Course Description: Our present is surrounded by futures. Weather reports; science fictio...

Such a great section of this article (Fine, Gary Alan. “Ground Truth: Verification Games in Operational Meteorology.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 35, no. 1, Feb. 2006, pp. 3–23), good job past me for assigning it in the quant section of the course

(to be clear, these are unless otherwise noted reposts of tweets I wrote, somewhat haphazardly, when I was reviewing the material before the first iteration of the course, in 2020. I may add in new observations as I go and will try to mark those as such if so)

another nice point: [note: I expanded this quote slightly from the original tweet]

Your reminder that we don't know everything

"The mission of any science-fiction is to present the contours of the “world-building” in a way that audiences accept"

I wonder how much the technical and verification aspects of meteorology have changed since 2006.

Borders are arbitrary and imaginary...

but the effects of borders are real.

contrast with science fiction, in which readers think they are looking at a TV screen and are in fact looking at a mirror

Fine (the author of the article I was citing, in case that first tweet was too long ago to remember) also has a full-length book about meteorology: www.amazon.com/Authors-Stor...

Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction: Fine, Gary Alan: 9780226249537: Amazon.com: Bookswww.amazon.com Buy Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction on Amazon.com ✓ FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders

I'm reviewing these articles to prepare for recording my class lecture. On quantification and measurement I want to talk about the field(s) I know well, humanitarian/development/emergency mgt. Because quantification isn't all bad! I am very pro- quant in some cases, e.g.

the Sphere standards, a huge collective effort to put some graspable numbers on the messy, uncertain, highly varied activity of disaster response

Sphere | A global community committed to humanitarian quality and accountability.spherestandards.org The Sphere community sets standards for humanitarian action and promotes quality and accountability

These make a big difference. I remember in Japan after the tsunami asking at a town hall whether a certain camp was getting enough water per day, and the official telling me "they get two trucks! who knows how much water is enough per day?!" Having numbers to aim for is important

(That official, btw, was a local water/infrastructure person. He had no professional reason before that time to know anything about international emergency standards, and he hadn't been given the information since. That incident was 1 of several that drew me to my dissertation.)

So I think numbers and measurement are really important for accountability and learning. But they have to be used properly. When I started reading government reports and evaluations on disasters like Katrina, I noticed that while they had lots of numbers...

they were all process indicators - eg, how many pallets of water were delivered. They lacked impact indicators - how many people received the minimum standard of water per day, or even how many people received any water at all.

Process indicators can tell you that the responding agency did a lot of work, but they can't tell you how many people were helped by that work, or whether they were helped a lot or a little.

You can't *get* impact indicator values for everything, of course, which is why you combine process and indicator. And, ideally, some qualitative data too, so people can tell you if they got the water but had to wait 6 hours to pick it up, or it tasted bad, or the bottles leaked.

Numbers are important, but they don't tell the whole story, and they can be difficult to do right and/or easy to purposefully do wrong. BUT we tend to treat numbers, and things that can be described in numbers, as "objective", "clear", and "true."

I like this (from Berman, Elizabeth Popp & Daniel Hirschman “The Sociology of Quantification: Where Are We Now?” Contemporary Sociology, 47.3 2018) b/c we do forget about the work that goes into numbers, which contributes to their perception as neutral @epopppp.bsky.social

All of those pieces of labor - and more - involve choices and human decision making. Numbers are more qualitative than their framing would have us believe.

[insert from the present: I'm doing further reading on quantification now and that article led me to Porter, Theodore M.. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 and it goes hard:

Yes. *Someday* I will finish writing this article on the 1790 census.

I just revisited that Popp Berman and Hirschman article, and it references Theodore Porter Trust in Numbers so I'm reading that now, and whew

Ooh, I'll have to get myself a copy of that Porter book. I've mostly read about Census issues and waded through census numbers. The article's current subtitle is "An Agony in [TBD] Fits" for good reasons.

there's a really good paragraph on census, you want me to paste it? (the rest of the book might be relevant too, depending what you're writing about, but the census bit is interesting to me.)

Sure, thanks!

Speaking of the census, I'm reminded of Dan Bouk's book and the related work he was doing at Data and Society. I've got to track down Porter's book now.

I know I just mentioned Artificial Unintelligence a few days ago, but it discusses this as well!

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