Numbers?

The fan in my laptop died. That’s my excuse for a string of broken promises. Not a very good excuse.

I’m still trying to work out the issue of majorities. Getting back to my trapped files didn’t help as much as I expected. The majorities began to trouble me when I was thinking about qualitative and quantitative research a few weeks ago in the policy course. I distrust statistics. I distrust the results from sites like Avaaz and Access. I wonder about the validity of the thousands of clicks when a proportion of them are surely uninformed responses to an emotional appeal. And in our recent general election the margins in two constituencies, after recounts, were 7 votes in one case and two in the other. Do we pay too much attention to numbers? Computers think with numbers. It’s very easy to generate numbers with computers. But what about people? How legitimate are numbers in the governance of people?