Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Deborah Stone Counting-Ho

Put that in the book because when i was in college i struggled with what i wanted to major in. And i was really torn between going into science and going into humanities of social scientists. And i finally decided on social science because i found those questions much more interesting and engaging and urgent for me. My First Political science course we read all of the great political philosophers from plato on up. And they were all asking the question, what is justice, what is good government, how can you organize government and organize society to make life better for people. In particularly to make justice. So i ended up, before i ended up deciding to be a Political Science major took this course. I took a had a lack of confidence in my school as a humanist or a social scientist because i did not get very good grades in those courses. But i got really good grades in my science and math courses. So it was kind of a dilemma. I took this Political Science class and i dont remember what the paper was on. You never remember that stuff. Remember the grade are the nasty comments. So the professor wrote this is a credible effort. But you will never be a political scientist. [laughter] host that really resonates and im sorry, i remember mysel myself, one of the reasons i had a similar dilemma, one of things and i realize in middle school i believe we are being taught about manifest destiny. As if it was a thing that we would believe. I remember thinking what comes to the perspective native americans, this is not at all a reasonable theory. I remember well at least in geometry, which i was taking at the time, when a prove something approves something something i could be comfortable with that. So i felt the discomfort somehow overwhelmed by interest. But my interest was there. And somehow for you i think it was the opposite, would you agree . Guest yes. I think that is right. Also i had a discomfort moment with numbers. Which is probably what led to this book. Its been head scratching for long time. I took my first economics cours course, i remember the professor graphs on the board of supply and demand curves. Sediment a beautiful model the market was. If you just believe he did say believe, but people buy things depending on the price. And suppliers sell things. And at the point where the price is right, a buyer wants to buy in the seller wants to sell. The market is perfect, it makes everybody happy. And i raise my hand and said price is not the only thing people think about when they decide whether to buy something or what they want to buy. In the professor said oh, i know that is true. But if we make this a simplification we can get some powerful conclusions by stripping away all the extraneous stuff. And not just bug the heck out of me. Thank you for that story. I agree with you, thats why when i took economics in college unlike this is not mathematical enough. For exactly the same reason. As to contextual too many assumptions. It was pure mathematics which is what i would consider the time, that is fine. You agree it stripped away. Strippeddown and then c. What you just said really does bri me to ity bookish question. Which is, i read the book but in thinking through a lot you have the idea of when you count things, im almost going to repeat what you said. We count things we have to classify them after strip them of context. And that is something that is a uniquely human thing. Thats what we teach our children to do. Tell us a little bit about that classification. And that number as a metaphor. That is the key pointf my book. I think we are taught in scho, and parents by whoever teaches a stick count, there is a right answer. U are tagging a number word like one two, three. If you are just tging number words onto things. But in fact you have to decide wh belongs in the group of things you are counting. So say a parent put down a bunch of oranges and apples and throat of kids is count the apples the kid has to know how to tell an apple from an orange. They have to be taught those rules before hand, beforehey can start to count. And that is a simple one. Go to somhing more interesting like counting ballots in an election. Somebody has to decide your countingotes. Thats we want to do is count votes for dferent candidates. Someone is making a decision before they even count the votes, what is a valid ballot customer does this ballot it, if its a mail in ballot does itean find in all the right places or whatever . Someone is deciding who is a voter who gets to cast the ballot so those decisions w is and who is out, those get made before anybody starts to tally up the number of votes on the ballot. The rolling on this for a few minutes. Its a very profound point. We think, i have three children. We think of teaching our children to count as a way, we think its an exercise that too comes after one or three comes after two, what comes after three et cetera. What your book has done is maybe rethink thats the easy part the hard part is the invisible part where we are asking them to categorize in the first place. You know it reminds me of one of my favorite conundrums that i came up with as a teenager. When you say to a peace of broccoli is at the stock that says hi back . Or is that the little florets at the end what is an individual item of nature in this context . Thats were always asking her sons and daughters to do is decide what belongs to what doesnt belong in ts category. Its very, very importa. Another example that came up with and reading your bk ive been thinking of this a lot, is for taxes. My from his perspective they think the tax calculation is hard. The tax calculation is really, really easy once you count whats income. This doesnt count. You get rid of this. Youd met your intemperate on you admit your income the tax calculation is really easy, right . How is what belongs and what doesnt belong. Its that negotiation we are constantly doing. I think its really important point. Going to provide a couple more examples . Guest i do that would b great. I came to thi insight and is reading doctor seussne fish two fish. Ive been thinking about this number stuff for a long time. And if i want to go back and see how kids learn to count. What that moment when you get the insight about quantity. I remember as the counting book. It starts out one fish, two fish, red fish blue fish, old fish new fish blackfish new fis fish. Agathon and on with different kinds of fish. It never gets past two. That is another verse that says hi fish low fish. Fast fish slow fish. Not one of them is like another. Dont ask us why, go ask your mother. And then i thought, if not one is like another, how do you know that they are all fish . How do you count them all is fish . How do we know. Maybe realize thats a problem of life. Everything is unique, right . It is only human, we need to group things in order to make sense of the world. And to think about things. We teach kids words, we teach in the word for nose and we teach them by pointing. My nose, daddys nose, doggy snows, you have a new puppy, dogs nose and my nose dont look anything alike. And babys nose does not look a whole lot like my nose. They have certain similarities that are meaningful to us adult adults. We won them all under one word. So i really think numbers are just another kind of language for categorizing things. Two at the great segue for my next series of questions. Numbers are just a language . Just merely . We also have this unbelievable power. You talk abo that quite brilliantly with respect to scoring systems. And language respect for to what you did talk a little bit about the system whereby people are asked to measure their own pain in a medical situation. And what does it even mean to measure onesain on a scale of one to ten . Guest wev ever had anything that causes pain on a scale from one to ten how bad is i sometimes they will s one is hardly noticeable in tennis off theharts i cant stand it anymore. I want to jump out the window. And most people are completely baffled by this question. We dont think of our pain. We experience it. And a lot of different ways. We dont experience it lik a thermometer with numbers. Wh i found really interesting about that is i asked lots ofriends about th scale when i was writing this book. And everybody says they find it really difficult to put their pain and a number. To put a number on their pain. And yet, medical syste keeps using it. And i think it has some benefit. Pain is on communicable. No one else can feelour pain. Thats just one of those experiences that is yrs and yours alone. An its really impossible to commicate. So trying to do that with a number is at least a start. A canadian dr. Who came over, i think a much better way of aski people to kind of asure or get a handle on peoples pain, it is a stem of words. You listen t people talk about their pain and they talk about 100 different words to characterize pain. Most of the medical professionals i talked to said the word system is much more helpful in allowin patients to express what they feel a help clinicians understand what ty feel. Some wor apparently are bingo words. I id oh that is a stomach als also. Im justaking that up example. Even though i think the pain is very problematic and very frustrating for people, its one big advantage. It is a language. It allow people to communicate a little bit. And you say my pain was a ten yesterday but its only a seven now, you are communicating that you feel that much better. Especially if the doctor has given you some pain meds a you are saying, youre sll a te say no to try something else. So it becomes a language of communication. It is better than nothing but is not a very good one. A couple of thoughts in that section about the pain numbers. The first one was that as far as how well the more contextual nuance word language for pain works, the billing company, Insurance Companies preferred the numbers. Essentially i think because they want to know how much they can charge should be treated for the doctors responsibility is to give you a pain med. That is really interesting. In some sense, what this quantified is more objective from the insurance agency. The flipside of that which i found more interesting i like you to discuss a little bit is the extent to which the patients themselves learn that rule. An asserted control over their own treatment deciding what to say when asked what is your pain level. Could you talk a little bit of the slip of a certain control the patients in the system . Back i learned from a friend who has cancer and who is on some pretty serious pain meds, that, she said to me they dont want you to be above a five. And i scratch my head, words that fit in . They tried to tell you not to say above a five. Like know if you are above a five, means theyre going to want to do something about it. 120 give you meds. So then, i talked to more people. People told me, theynow. Its kind of a cat and mouse game. You put down a five and they put down whatever. They p down whatever their answer is of the next card is. So people who are experiencing a lot of pai often make a trade out themselves. Becauseain meds and make you zombie. That the word people use. They mess of their head, tt you cant think clearly they make y tired so people who have a lot of pain sometimeshink i dont wanto just be doped up on opioids. And so several of my friends told me that they lrned, theyearn to use the scale to contl what the nurse or the doct would do. If they didnt want moreain meds they would say a low numbe number. Host one of the things i learned from the book, was just how much a scoring system exerted insurance of power and in terms of ts authority. That if i hear talk about a Public School teacher which her book also discusses, indicate models corporate so many of the teachers in that system, there natural reaction was to trust the number because it is a fr. We are so used to trusting our store. Our pico store we have our weights, we have iq score are expected to trust tse things. D the trust isnt always deserved. It is fascinating to see, and that example you just gave of the pain meds as the patient, in other words the targe of the score is actuay taking control because it is so rare. Usuallyhose scores are power over the target is a rare case we target take back the power. June to talk a little bit about the teachers and the scoring system for the teachers . Guest its talk about power first. To go back the pain thing, the reason why the patients can take control is because they are the ones scoring themselves. So that is unusual. Somebody elses scoring you. And we all grow up in school being scored all of the time, in given grades. We are used to being the weekend of your scoring system. And unfortunately, kids learn very early on that the teacher is right or the great is right. A greater make them doubt themselves. I certainly doubted myself when i was told they gotta be and i would never be a political scientist. And i dont know why, its a long story why i came around tot. So,et numbers have this or a interctural being objective there is a lot of slogans nowadays to say we want to makevidencebased decisions. We want to me data based decisis. We want our decision to be driven by research, driven by facts and what people mean nowadays by facts, evidence data and number numrs. They think those are objective. And words are squishy and subject to interpretion, which they are. The point of my book. [laughter] so, yeah. People used scoring systems and all kinds of organizations to make decisions that are going to affect other peoples lives. Whether they hire them, fire them, promote them, give them a pay raise for you talk about in your book gives them insurance. How much to charge them for their insurance. Whether to give them a bank loa loan. So the example that both fascinates us, fascinates both of us about teachers is that people and education bureaucracies wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and producing results. They came up right away to measure results which was testing students on reading and math, pretty much those two subjects. And then students spend a year in a classroom and do well on those tests students to do well. Some model of how they work but they develop fancy formulas sort out exactly how much of the student test score and how much is going to extraneous factors how good the p1s in the previous grade. And how much they did in the past. The teacher will give them credit if you did better than expected. The students did better than expected. But its also a mathematical model. In addition to that also either rewarded penalize them on the basis of their score. Is it that they could get fired . Whole schools to be shut down or taken over by Emergency Management or whatever . Put into receivership . And School Budgets would be determined how these teachers were performing . It could be life and death consequences. Not literally but job losing consequences for teachers to get a bad score. It is the combination of the scoring system and the attachment of rewards and penalties. These are the consequences. Switch of the score is what i tell about in the book. We, all of us Hope Education does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract. And pass a reading comprehension test. Those that the shows curiosity the students. Instill with learning and confidence that they can learn. So that they want to learn, and boost them. And encourage their imagination. So sure, i want my kids learn how to count. I want them to learn how to read and write. I want them to do so much more than that but i want education to do that. And the problem is, these formulas for how much value a teacher adds to a student knowledge are really so narrowly defined. They include only these narrow parts of education. The such a small part of it. Sue back i often say its over assessing a teacher with test scores. We would even have to go through this 12 year experiment torturing teachers. I guess because see that. the virus against women wasnt counted when were talking about violence against women, im partly disabled because i want people to realize that this is wonderful examples the gdp, what is counted as production it moves for the nation or other nations and of course madisons as a virginia slaveholder and his calculation as what can count as a human with rights take one of those that you would like to go through to lay down that point very strongly that its really not about the counting, the counting is an easy part is about what counts, what gets categorized appropriately so we can count it later. It is hard to choose, i think we can come back to others and other contracts, the un wanted to develop in a way to measure under violence and many countries and had a whole bunch of Committee Meetings and invited people from Different Countries and what they wanted to do is set up the indicators and what counts as violence, is it rape, is it murder, is it beating up somebody, is it kicking somebody. The women who are from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count as gender violence and they would ultimately go around and do ads and surveys and ask if youve experienced this or that. So there was rape in beating and kicking and someone in the things that northern and western people came up with. And then there was bungalow women and they say we have different kind of violence throwing acid in your face, burning, setting you on fire and dropping from a high place, sticking needles under your fingernail, smashing your hand, those are things that we think are violent, it was psychological violence to take another wife, take a second wife were to be rate and punish a woman for not giving birth to a male child. Those were things they considered gender violence. In the committee that will timidly design the survey did not include any of those things that the women had brought up. There you have a case, a question of whos in the room, its a combat to power, who is in the room when these decisions are getting made, what comes as violence, bungalow dishy and woman were in the room but they werent Strong Enough to get the definition or their experiences of violence counted as examples of violence, when the survey gets done that wont be done. It is really about power especially the three sets will, we dont have time for all of those questions i have saw move ahead, i would like you because im looking for positive stories about numbers and powers and i want to talk about numbers as witnesses in flint, michigan if you would. Before i talk about that i just want to say a lot of people when they first hear my message they worry that im telling people never trust the number, numbers are not good we should not count, that is not my message at all, i think people can be extremely helpful and have lots of examples. The flint michigan water crisis is one of them where the city of flint switched its source of water from detroit reservoir to the flint river and shortly after that people started noticing that there watered smelled and tasted funny and they started having pretty serious like their hair was falling o, skin rashes and First Political<\/a> science course we read all of the great political philosophers from plato on up. And they were all asking the question, what is justice, what is good government, how can you organize government and organize society to make life better for people. In particularly to make justice. So i ended up, before i ended up deciding to be a Political Science<\/a> major took this course. I took a had a lack of confidence in my school as a humanist or a social scientist because i did not get very good grades in those courses. But i got really good grades in my science and math courses. So it was kind of a dilemma. I took this Political Science<\/a> class and i dont remember what the paper was on. You never remember that stuff. Remember the grade are the nasty comments. So the professor wrote this is a credible effort. But you will never be a political scientist. [laughter] host that really resonates and im sorry, i remember mysel myself, one of the reasons i had a similar dilemma, one of things and i realize in middle school i believe we are being taught about manifest destiny. As if it was a thing that we would believe. I remember thinking what comes to the perspective native americans, this is not at all a reasonable theory. I remember well at least in geometry, which i was taking at the time, when a prove something approves something something i could be comfortable with that. So i felt the discomfort somehow overwhelmed by interest. But my interest was there. And somehow for you i think it was the opposite, would you agree . Guest yes. I think that is right. Also i had a discomfort moment with numbers. Which is probably what led to this book. Its been head scratching for long time. I took my first economics cours course, i remember the professor graphs on the board of supply and demand curves. Sediment a beautiful model the market was. If you just believe he did say believe, but people buy things depending on the price. And suppliers sell things. And at the point where the price is right, a buyer wants to buy in the seller wants to sell. The market is perfect, it makes everybody happy. And i raise my hand and said price is not the only thing people think about when they decide whether to buy something or what they want to buy. In the professor said oh, i know that is true. But if we make this a simplification we can get some powerful conclusions by stripping away all the extraneous stuff. And not just bug the heck out of me. Thank you for that story. I agree with you, thats why when i took economics in college unlike this is not mathematical enough. For exactly the same reason. As to contextual too many assumptions. It was pure mathematics which is what i would consider the time, that is fine. You agree it stripped away. Strippeddown and then c. What you just said really does bri me to ity bookish question. Which is, i read the book but in thinking through a lot you have the idea of when you count things, im almost going to repeat what you said. We count things we have to classify them after strip them of context. And that is something that is a uniquely human thing. Thats what we teach our children to do. Tell us a little bit about that classification. And that number as a metaphor. That is the key pointf my book. I think we are taught in scho, and parents by whoever teaches a stick count, there is a right answer. U are tagging a number word like one two, three. If you are just tging number words onto things. But in fact you have to decide wh belongs in the group of things you are counting. So say a parent put down a bunch of oranges and apples and throat of kids is count the apples the kid has to know how to tell an apple from an orange. They have to be taught those rules before hand, beforehey can start to count. And that is a simple one. Go to somhing more interesting like counting ballots in an election. Somebody has to decide your countingotes. Thats we want to do is count votes for dferent candidates. Someone is making a decision before they even count the votes, what is a valid ballot customer does this ballot it, if its a mail in ballot does itean find in all the right places or whatever . Someone is deciding who is a voter who gets to cast the ballot so those decisions w is and who is out, those get made before anybody starts to tally up the number of votes on the ballot. The rolling on this for a few minutes. Its a very profound point. We think, i have three children. We think of teaching our children to count as a way, we think its an exercise that too comes after one or three comes after two, what comes after three et cetera. What your book has done is maybe rethink thats the easy part the hard part is the invisible part where we are asking them to categorize in the first place. You know it reminds me of one of my favorite conundrums that i came up with as a teenager. When you say to a peace of broccoli is at the stock that says hi back . Or is that the little florets at the end what is an individual item of nature in this context . Thats were always asking her sons and daughters to do is decide what belongs to what doesnt belong in ts category. Its very, very importa. Another example that came up with and reading your bk ive been thinking of this a lot, is for taxes. My from his perspective they think the tax calculation is hard. The tax calculation is really, really easy once you count whats income. This doesnt count. You get rid of this. Youd met your intemperate on you admit your income the tax calculation is really easy, right . How is what belongs and what doesnt belong. Its that negotiation we are constantly doing. I think its really important point. Going to provide a couple more examples . Guest i do that would b great. I came to thi insight and is reading doctor seussne fish two fish. Ive been thinking about this number stuff for a long time. And if i want to go back and see how kids learn to count. What that moment when you get the insight about quantity. I remember as the counting book. It starts out one fish, two fish, red fish blue fish, old fish new fish blackfish new fis fish. Agathon and on with different kinds of fish. It never gets past two. That is another verse that says hi fish low fish. Fast fish slow fish. Not one of them is like another. Dont ask us why, go ask your mother. And then i thought, if not one is like another, how do you know that they are all fish . How do you count them all is fish . How do we know. Maybe realize thats a problem of life. Everything is unique, right . It is only human, we need to group things in order to make sense of the world. And to think about things. We teach kids words, we teach in the word for nose and we teach them by pointing. My nose, daddys nose, doggy snows, you have a new puppy, dogs nose and my nose dont look anything alike. And babys nose does not look a whole lot like my nose. They have certain similarities that are meaningful to us adult adults. We won them all under one word. So i really think numbers are just another kind of language for categorizing things. Two at the great segue for my next series of questions. Numbers are just a language . Just merely . We also have this unbelievable power. You talk abo that quite brilliantly with respect to scoring systems. And language respect for to what you did talk a little bit about the system whereby people are asked to measure their own pain in a medical situation. And what does it even mean to measure onesain on a scale of one to ten . Guest wev ever had anything that causes pain on a scale from one to ten how bad is i sometimes they will s one is hardly noticeable in tennis off theharts i cant stand it anymore. I want to jump out the window. And most people are completely baffled by this question. We dont think of our pain. We experience it. And a lot of different ways. We dont experience it lik a thermometer with numbers. Wh i found really interesting about that is i asked lots ofriends about th scale when i was writing this book. And everybody says they find it really difficult to put their pain and a number. To put a number on their pain. And yet, medical syste keeps using it. And i think it has some benefit. Pain is on communicable. No one else can feelour pain. Thats just one of those experiences that is yrs and yours alone. An its really impossible to commicate. So trying to do that with a number is at least a start. A canadian dr. Who came over, i think a much better way of aski people to kind of asure or get a handle on peoples pain, it is a stem of words. You listen t people talk about their pain and they talk about 100 different words to characterize pain. Most of the medical professionals i talked to said the word system is much more helpful in allowin patients to express what they feel a help clinicians understand what ty feel. Some wor apparently are bingo words. I id oh that is a stomach als also. Im justaking that up example. Even though i think the pain is very problematic and very frustrating for people, its one big advantage. It is a language. It allow people to communicate a little bit. And you say my pain was a ten yesterday but its only a seven now, you are communicating that you feel that much better. Especially if the doctor has given you some pain meds a you are saying, youre sll a te say no to try something else. So it becomes a language of communication. It is better than nothing but is not a very good one. A couple of thoughts in that section about the pain numbers. The first one was that as far as how well the more contextual nuance word language for pain works, the billing company, Insurance Companies<\/a> preferred the numbers. Essentially i think because they want to know how much they can charge should be treated for the doctors responsibility is to give you a pain med. That is really interesting. In some sense, what this quantified is more objective from the insurance agency. The flipside of that which i found more interesting i like you to discuss a little bit is the extent to which the patients themselves learn that rule. An asserted control over their own treatment deciding what to say when asked what is your pain level. Could you talk a little bit of the slip of a certain control the patients in the system . Back i learned from a friend who has cancer and who is on some pretty serious pain meds, that, she said to me they dont want you to be above a five. And i scratch my head, words that fit in . They tried to tell you not to say above a five. Like know if you are above a five, means theyre going to want to do something about it. 120 give you meds. So then, i talked to more people. People told me, theynow. Its kind of a cat and mouse game. You put down a five and they put down whatever. They p down whatever their answer is of the next card is. So people who are experiencing a lot of pai often make a trade out themselves. Becauseain meds and make you zombie. That the word people use. They mess of their head, tt you cant think clearly they make y tired so people who have a lot of pain sometimeshink i dont wanto just be doped up on opioids. And so several of my friends told me that they lrned, theyearn to use the scale to contl what the nurse or the doct would do. If they didnt want moreain meds they would say a low numbe number. Host one of the things i learned from the book, was just how much a scoring system exerted insurance of power and in terms of ts authority. That if i hear talk about a Public School<\/a> teacher which her book also discusses, indicate models corporate so many of the teachers in that system, there natural reaction was to trust the number because it is a fr. We are so used to trusting our store. Our pico store we have our weights, we have iq score are expected to trust tse things. D the trust isnt always deserved. It is fascinating to see, and that example you just gave of the pain meds as the patient, in other words the targe of the score is actuay taking control because it is so rare. Usuallyhose scores are power over the target is a rare case we target take back the power. June to talk a little bit about the teachers and the scoring system for the teachers . Guest its talk about power first. To go back the pain thing, the reason why the patients can take control is because they are the ones scoring themselves. So that is unusual. Somebody elses scoring you. And we all grow up in school being scored all of the time, in given grades. We are used to being the weekend of your scoring system. And unfortunately, kids learn very early on that the teacher is right or the great is right. A greater make them doubt themselves. I certainly doubted myself when i was told they gotta be and i would never be a political scientist. And i dont know why, its a long story why i came around tot. So,et numbers have this or a interctural being objective there is a lot of slogans nowadays to say we want to makevidencebased decisions. We want to me data based decisis. We want our decision to be driven by research, driven by facts and what people mean nowadays by facts, evidence data and number numrs. They think those are objective. And words are squishy and subject to interpretion, which they are. The point of my book. [laughter] so, yeah. People used scoring systems and all kinds of organizations to make decisions that are going to affect other peoples lives. Whether they hire them, fire them, promote them, give them a pay raise for you talk about in your book gives them insurance. How much to charge them for their insurance. Whether to give them a bank loa loan. So the example that both fascinates us, fascinates both of us about teachers is that people and education bureaucracies wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and producing results. They came up right away to measure results which was testing students on reading and math, pretty much those two subjects. And then students spend a year in a classroom and do well on those tests students to do well. Some model of how they work but they develop fancy formulas sort out exactly how much of the student test score and how much is going to extraneous factors how good the p1s in the previous grade. And how much they did in the past. The teacher will give them credit if you did better than expected. The students did better than expected. But its also a mathematical model. In addition to that also either rewarded penalize them on the basis of their score. Is it that they could get fired . Whole schools to be shut down or taken over by Emergency Management<\/a> or whatever . Put into receivership . And School Budgets<\/a> would be determined how these teachers were performing . It could be life and death consequences. Not literally but job losing consequences for teachers to get a bad score. It is the combination of the scoring system and the attachment of rewards and penalties. These are the consequences. Switch of the score is what i tell about in the book. We, all of us Hope Education<\/a> does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract. And pass a reading comprehension test. Those that the shows curiosity the students. Instill with learning and confidence that they can learn. So that they want to learn, and boost them. And encourage their imagination. So sure, i want my kids learn how to count. I want them to learn how to read and write. I want them to do so much more than that but i want education to do that. And the problem is, these formulas for how much value a teacher adds to a student knowledge are really so narrowly defined. They include only these narrow parts of education. The such a small part of it. Sue back i often say its over assessing a teacher with test scores. We would even have to go through this 12 year experiment torturing teachers. I guess because see that. the virus against women wasnt counted when were talking about violence against women, im partly disabled because i want people to realize that this is wonderful examples the gdp, what is counted as production it moves for the nation or other nations and of course madisons as a virginia slaveholder and his calculation as what can count as a human with rights take one of those that you would like to go through to lay down that point very strongly that its really not about the counting, the counting is an easy part is about what counts, what gets categorized appropriately so we can count it later. It is hard to choose, i think we can come back to others and other contracts, the un wanted to develop in a way to measure under violence and many countries and had a whole bunch of Committee Meetings<\/a> and invited people from Different Countries<\/a> and what they wanted to do is set up the indicators and what counts as violence, is it rape, is it murder, is it beating up somebody, is it kicking somebody. The women who are from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count as gender violence and they would ultimately go around and do ads and surveys and ask if youve experienced this or that. So there was rape in beating and kicking and someone in the things that northern and western people came up with. And then there was bungalow women and they say we have different kind of violence throwing acid in your face, burning, setting you on fire and dropping from a high place, sticking needles under your fingernail, smashing your hand, those are things that we think are violent, it was psychological violence to take another wife, take a second wife were to be rate and punish a woman for not giving birth to a male child. Those were things they considered gender violence. In the committee that will timidly design the survey did not include any of those things that the women had brought up. There you have a case, a question of whos in the room, its a combat to power, who is in the room when these decisions are getting made, what comes as violence, bungalow dishy and woman were in the room but they werent Strong Enough<\/a> to get the definition or their experiences of violence counted as examples of violence, when the survey gets done that wont be done. It is really about power especially the three sets will, we dont have time for all of those questions i have saw move ahead, i would like you because im looking for positive stories about numbers and powers and i want to talk about numbers as witnesses in flint, michigan if you would. Before i talk about that i just want to say a lot of people when they first hear my message they worry that im telling people never trust the number, numbers are not good we should not count, that is not my message at all, i think people can be extremely helpful and have lots of examples. The flint michigan water crisis is one of them where the city of flint switched its source of water from detroit reservoir to the flint river and shortly after that people started noticing that there watered smelled and tasted funny and they started having pretty serious like their hair was falling o, skin rashes and Everybody Knows<\/a> that there was a lot of blood in theater and a lot of children had blood poisoning because they were drinking this water. Number were really critical to finding out what the problem was. It turned out that the epa, Environmental Protection<\/a> agency has standards for water safe levels of wind and waternd it should not be wind and water i the clean water act says no one should be using lead pipes anymore, that was 1986. , old pipes are grandfaered in in. Flint, michigan had a lot of housing stop with old pipes. The cdc uses numbers to say how muchs a safe level of blood in ybodys blood, you can do blood testing count particles o blood. Particl of blood, yes thank you. Thcdc said noevel is safe but above a certain level w should be concerned. Above five we should be concerd but we dont need to eat until were about 45, a person is about 45. But helping the citizens to have a water engineer come in and test their waternd he figured out right away that there was probably blood in the water because of corrosion from old pipes. He tested the water and sure enough there was very high levels. By the way michigan in the departme of Environmental Affairs<\/a> had tested the water but claimed that it was safe that there was no blood in it in the way that they tested it, it turned out in t water engineer discovered, they told the residents that they lethe water run and they flush all the love particles out of the pipe so they got low ratings. This water eineer came in and he got numbershat were very, very high and then a doctor, a pediatrician was hearing concerns of a mother of his patient and h has access to a of the blood levels blood test loving, she put i the hospital when she was done, she compared the blood levels compared to the new switch of water to after eure enoh, the levels went up dramatically. Those two sets of numbers put together were a story that the water engineer made very convcing, the lead pipes corrode and sent particles into the water that gets into peoples blood. Those two witnesses went to the cityo condemn and lack of doing anything about the water, the lead problem. I still feel like the story because there so often the case that we do find out that numbers were on your side and yet you lost, there mustve been, i think there was good Media Coverage<\/a> o this, i think i even heard pediatrians being forgiven, somehow the real numbers, the led water levs, ey were somehow brought to the surface. The power somehow would overcome. Do you know how . I think two things, is pretty typical, there are few citizens, one mom in particular who just knew not to trust the numbers and she insisted and brought water samples and two Government Agencies<\/a> and so on but i forget she contacted the water engineer but the second one citizen advocacy and she eventually got lots of moms to test their water, that the water engineer provided. The second ingredient for overcoming power is that the citizens had allies who were in agencies and in government or science experts like the water engineer and the doctor so they became passionate about the problem in the patients and the homeowners and so on. It was good numbers even when theyre right, they dont always emerge victorious. Can you tell the audience a little bit about what you call the fo fixed date affect. Its a little device that you wear on your wrist and encounter steps of fitbit, people who wear tbit try to make themselves exercise more by counting their steps and try to reach goals, the interesting thing about it, everyone i know who has a fitbit says that they walk more because a fitbit is cnting them, and boost the to walk a little bit longer, if they havent reached the 10000 steckel for the day. So i use that as a metaphor its phenomenon so when you count somethin you count your spouse and you wt to look good on a mixture then we will change your behavior to get a good count and a good number. Thats a fixat fitbit effect. I hope you appreciate my point, i dont disagree with the fact tt people like to look good, its an impactful metric that is measuring them and they will change theirehavior to make their metric look good and that i well understood, i write about that myself a when i ta about Colleges Ranking<\/a> model, that is certainly a very important factor in how College Ministry<\/a> does act almos all fitbit users after a couple months or completely ignore them, i would say one thing interestin that happened that you are listening to the people that normally where there fitbit and talk about their fitbit which is a very narrow group of people if you dont mind me saying, the real fitbit is that fitbits and people ignore the, its immediate ovehelming story about fitbit, they dont cause people to change their behavior but there are few people for whom the fitbit is what they really want and for them if the story is different. You see what im saying. Its a fair enough point and clearly only people who are motivated get a fitbit and wear it and once theyre no longer motivated, what im saying is still holds for the short term, maybe it doesnt change peoples behavior for the longterm, at the moment or during that time or a couple of months when theyre infatuated wit her new fitbit their gung ho and they probably do lose some weightt first but maybe they dont stay on it. Diet is the ultimate example of this. And for that matter diet, theres one thing of having selfselected by them, en most people who buy fitbit, then theres experiments because fitbit super users look so good on fitbit, the Health Programs<\/a> will buy fitbit for everyone on their Health Policy<\/a> and guess what those people dont even want the fitbi to begin with, theyre not fascinated, they dont ever use them and is a compete disaster. Im just thinking its very selfselected small slice of mans that that effect actually happens, lets n dwell on that poin as a metaphor is perfectly reasonable can we talk about pulling in reeses point inhe fitbit effect. Social science really tries to understand racist attitudes and racist thinking, they do that by asking People Survey<\/a> questions so some of the questions when i started looking into this appalled me that anyone can even ask these questions one of them is on a scale from 1 7 where one is lazy and seven is hardworking, where you think blocks fall, the same thing on intelligence and violence for example. Survey questions like these and lots of better survey questions, do you think immigrants generally good for the country are bad for the country, thats a ridiculous question if you think about it, what those questions do, they have an implicit lesson which is stereotyping is legitime, you can decide that every membe of a racial gro is some degree of laziness of harworking and thats a legitimate way to think,hats what theuestion implies is a legitimate way, i think it reinforces that race is a real thing and its a real category and people can categorize easily into black or white and it leaves all sorts of people, that they can make judgments about a whole group and the political leaders were waiting to hear the political opinion, they wanted to know how people stereotype, i think that self reinforcing effect that i like. It is conducted to the idea that you want to look good for the poll takers . Yes, there is a lot of work in survey research were is called the social desirability affect, people want to give a desirable answer, they want to appear smart, they want to appear not prejudiced and what is amazing, there plenty of people that are willing to express prejudiced but in general that is a huge problem in survey research, people have done telephone interviews, people want to sound good to someone interviewing them. I think half the time people dont know what question means and theyont understand it but they give an answer so they wont soundumb. The late night tv talk shows that view that against people and other absolute garbage questions and theyet people to answer. I would like to tal about the senses i the category of hispanics, i find thato be a fascinating story in the section of the book. Also i think related to the fitbit effect, if you dont mind mentioning that. Sure the senses first started asking a question, is this person hispanic in the 1980s, before 1970 the term hispanic was not in much use in the United States<\/a>, there were a lot of people whose origins were in spanishspeaking countries were tickly mexico, puerto rico, they live together and tended to cluster together in certain areas of the United States<\/a> and they did not think of themselves as hispanic, they thought of themselves as cuban, puerto rican or mexican. But in the late 60s and 70s and after the Civil Rights Act<\/a> it equal opportunity, the government wanted to get racial and ethnic classification to make sure it could enforce equal treatment and equal voting for example. It wanted to collect data on that and so the Census Bureau<\/a> wanted to have aispanic question but they really did not know how they were going to get people t think of themselves as hispanic. So they called a meeting of hispanic leaders from the different groups and ask them to promote the senses to their communities and to encourage people to identify as hispanic and the leaders were all in favor of that because at that point, they understood that ther was benefits to have from having big numbers and maybe we get more seats in congress if people were covered in areas where they live and you get more federal aid to cities and places where people live. Again this was measuring instrument, the senses created the category, put the question out there and quite actively recruited people and encourage people t answer the question yes ando answer yes. It was in interactive feedback effect where a category was there and people put themselves into it. What i like about that story, i did not kno that in the senses by taking on that category actuall had an effect on people self regard and self image as an identity. It also reminds me going back to the earlier discussion about people choosing the pain number at would give them the treatment that they want,his is ather example of the targets of the countin senses, it targets the people asserting control over their own agencyy filling out their own form, sometimes again they were there masters of their own destiny by naming their own ethnicity in their own race which was a whole different disssion that you also could have about the race that they might choose. Thank you for making that analogy, i did not qte see it in the same way but i very much true that the senses ges people a sense to identify themselves what the race is and ethnicity in more categories and chois you can have and you can write in another race, what is fascinating that i came up with, some other race washe Third Largest<\/a> category of racen the 2010 census, it tells me that peop dont likeo acct the categories that their offer and its a funny paradox andn the oneand it says you can identify whatever ways he would say you are that you want to be or csider yourself. But on the other hand the cens people give categories, they provide categories. Yes. The last topic i want to cover, i have a few more but were running out of time is the context of the Child Services<\/a> hotline algorithm, thats a mouthful but basically a child abuse hotline and i rod i read s wonderful book and you talk about her work in some other stuff too. Ive spent quite a bit of time talking to people who started the algorithm and i do feel like im not saying its perfect, it is not perfect, the flaws are well laid out in your book, poor people are much more likely to be read lighted, people of color are much more likely to be reported on their choosing the wrong prediction variable which means theyre predicting in creating their own reality by saying this kid is more likely to be taken from her home, there are all sorts of problems but let me make this following plea, we have been talkingbout power for this hour and a lot of the times iet frustrated because people are assuming authority and power and unreasonable, unaccountable way, they are trying to get away with something basically, that happens a lot, with numbers, and the scoring system becausets objective and you have no right to appeal type of thing. But i would argue in a cas of social workers trying to deal with child abuse, i would like them to have cover, a little bit of cover ift worksor them and i say as a social worker because they have so much responsibility to make the right call on the actual lifeanddeath matters, do you see what im saying in some sense i would love it and i think we can all agree i wou love it if they have a machine that would let them do their job, and if the machine was wrong, they can say the machine was wrong usually when sai somee says aa may blame the machine, thats a copout but in this case and like you did your best, it is really hard to make calls. It really is, its really hard but i think the more relevant plea i will make for that algorithm, again is problematic, it is problematic, because it is data and you are collecting data it is auditable and it has and the same could be true or said for uber systems of hiring my algorithm, these are system that once made algorithmic, the good news is you could make them work better because they are following rules and you can shift rules of the old rules are not working very well, thats my other plea and the final thing i will say you talk a lot in the last part of the book about ethics and the thing i keep on pointing out when i talk about th child abuse hotline, there is a trolley problem embedded in the child abuse hotline that is for children, there is a false positive of an algorithm or process, the process itself looks how did decide whether to take a child from their home if there was abuse, you can take kids away from their home and they should not be taken, you can leave kids in their home when they should be taken, these are two mistakes that a system can make in their different mistakes and theyre not equal, its worst to leave a kid to abuse then take a kid away from a family that is not really abusing them, im not saying its a good idea but this is worse. Let me jump in, absolutely, anything that we can do to help people and help their leaders make better decisions is a good thing and i think the good thing about numbers is trying to measure things, come up with a system whether an algorithm or a simple indicator is that the exercise of trying to measure things forces us to think about what we value and what we care about, what is important and the point i want to leave people with, maybe the system is better or still has problems but its better than what we had to do before and anything that can take the burden off is good but we should not stop ever, we should always be trying to improve those systems and those measurements and i think if we think of numbers as a language we are talking about a values and whats important and whos been hurt in his being helped, then were using them wisely, if we think of them as this is the score, thats the in, i am right, youre wrong, that is not a recipe for progress. I could not agree more, i am really glad i had the chance to read this book and im glad i had the chance to have this discussion today trade thank you very much. Weeknights this month were featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every week and on cspan2. Coming up tonight a look at business and economics, ed freeman discusses responsibly in ethics that he says unites influential businesses in history professor explores the. A black financial innovation between 1888 in 1930 and the firstnd","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"archive.org","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","width":"800","height":"600","url":"\/\/ia801803.us.archive.org\/8\/items\/CSPAN2_20201126_000300_After_Words_Deborah_Stone_Counting-How_We_Use_Numbers_to_Decide_What...\/CSPAN2_20201126_000300_After_Words_Deborah_Stone_Counting-How_We_Use_Numbers_to_Decide_What....thumbs\/CSPAN2_20201126_000300_After_Words_Deborah_Stone_Counting-How_We_Use_Numbers_to_Decide_What..._000001.jpg"}},"autauthor":{"@type":"Organization"},"author":{"sameAs":"archive.org","name":"archive.org"}}],"coverageEndTime":"20240716T12:35:10+00:00"}