I love math. I am better at it than the general population. I use it to make my living. I also use it as a club to beat people over the head to show them I’m smarter than them. Liberals love to use math in that last way too. Any political argument, ethical argument, or racial argument and liberals will be the first ones to dig into their bag o’ stats and pull out some numbers.
The problem is that numbers are not an argument.
No one figures out what is right or wrong based on some mathematical calculation. What they do, however, is use them to “back up” their argument and force you to focus on the numbers rather than the principles behind their yapping.
Let us look at the current crisis the media is shoving down our throats right now, hashtag black lives matter. What’s the argument that the protesters use as a club, as they march down the streets with literal clubs? “Black men are targeted by cops.” When pressed, they’ll pull out that proportionally (OH SHIT I remember “proportion” from math class) black men are shot higher rate than white men.
Is this true? Sure, why not. But why do they pick that number? Why not total deaths by cop? Well in that case it is whites, but it seems more fair (is it?) to calculate the numbers proportionally, especially since whites vastly outnumber blacks in the country. OK, everyone can generally accept that… but does that tell the whole story? Of course not. What the protesters don’t shout out, as they block streets, is that blacks are poorer, tend to live in higher crime areas, tend to have more violent interactions with cops, black cops tend to use force at a higher rate against black suspects than white cops, etc., etc. There’s a lot more to the picture than just some proportionality.
The wider problem with using these numbers is: who cares? These statistics are used to start an argument, but never to solve one. Social issues aren’t fixed by mathematicians, but by people who use ideas to change minds. Society wouldn’t change one bit if we installed a computer in every gun that calculated violence by race and seized up a cops gun if the nation were to go over its quota of murder for a particular race (well… it would probably change a bit, but not for the better.)
Society changes when the fundamental ideas change. Statistics can be used to highlight a potential problem, but the argument has to move past that pretty quickly if we actually want to fix the problem, and I do not see anyone moving past the numbers.