Numbers v. Narrative

I don't think you can explain the world with numbers.

In this day and age of big data emphasis on numbers and size is drowning out the human element. Decisions on a policy level ultimately are not made based on numbers. However numbers may help along the way.

You need a number to explain unemployment. You need numbers to qualify weapons or troops. But numbers don't tell you the resolve of an actor to carry out its aims. Numbers don't necessarily tell you what an actor is interested in pursuing with respects to foreign policy. Numbers won't predict a leaders' substance abuse and the repercussions of that, nor will they predict decisions made under extreme pressure.

Numbers are not the end all be all. Numbers dont tell the whole story. Numbers don't even tell half the story.

But in the same vein qualitative cultural data doesn't tell all of the story either. But it does tell us more of the story. It can examine why leaders and governments make the decisions they make. Numbers can be interpreted many different ways, but then again, so can words.

I think we have a problem in America. We tend to over emphasize numbers, figures and graphs even when we can't understand them. And perhaps because we can't understand them. We trust that those who have developed the numbers are trustworthy. But that's where we fail. Numbers aren't always trustworthy because the researchers or research methods aren't always trustworthy.

We need to augment numbers with narrative. We need to start trusting good qualitative data with the same level of trust we give to numbers.

Numbers and narrative go hand in hand. I wish we trusted them equally.