A local car wash offers a "Triple-Mega Car Wash." Can you imagine? That's a full 50% better than a Double Mega Car Wash! Statistics don't lie.Speaking of statistics, here's a sentence, courtesy of Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, that you probably never expected to read: "I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I'm not kidding." ("For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics") Sexy? Maybe, maybe not. But the world is so data-saturated that those who can interpret it will certainly become ever-more attractive to some people.
In Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, one of the main characters is a "psychologist." The word, though, doesn't have its familiar meaning: psychologists in those books are really sort of statistical soothsayers; they look at data, scope out trends, and are thus more-or-less able to "predict" the future (presumably within some sort of confidence interval--yes, the Solipsist is a bit of a datahead himself).
It seems life is now imitating art (whether its appropriate to call Foundation "art" is a question we'll leave for another day). Tech-savvy math whizzes--math-savvy tech whizzes?--make six-figure salaries crunching numbers for Google and other companies. And what are they doing if not trying to predict the future? How better to figure out the next hot commodity or political rising star or looming epidemic than by reading the digital entrails of the internet community?
A nagging fear: People are becoming data points. But then, no. Not "becoming"; "are"--or, rather, have always been. We're neither more nor less "predictable" than we've ever been. All that's changed is our ability to compile the psychosocial data. Still, there's something ironic in the thought that our greater ability to compile and analyze the choices and preoccupations that make us human are used to target and to an extent program--dehumanize--the people who make the choices. Two sides to every coin, we suppose. And that's a statistic, too.
You're right,keeping track of stats and numbers on what people think, do, buy etc. is nothing new. But what is new is the ease and, dare I say it, SNEAKY way in which it is collected makes one ponder the similarity between our beloved sci-fi and our present disturbing reality.My darling and somewhat unstable conspiracy theorist(j/k), occasionally will spell our last name slightly different on websites and various other things, to then see what he gets in the mail or on the phone and can identify where his name probably was obtained for advertising fodder. What is it with me tonight???I keep writing the longest dumb-ass sentences...Lol! Sorry Sol!
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