Eternal Truth

A friend sent me this with the note -" it is impossible to overstate the importance of data." That reminded me of an incident when I was at the University of the Pacific. When I was an undergraduate one of my two leading professors was a leader in the American Political Science Association for the Western States. The APSA was going through a schism between the quants and the non-quants. Some in the field of political science argued that political science would only be a science when everything was proven by data. My professor thought that data could not substitute for thought. We went to the WPSA (the western meeting of the APSA that year) and a graduate student from Berkeley presented a paper where he suggested with a high degree of confidence (the statistical kind not the one involving thinking) that based on his study of the voting behavior of members of congress that in the period between 1955 and 1960 (about six or eight years before the meeting) that congressmen from rural southern districts were more likely than congressmen from northern urban districts to be supportive of increases in agricultural subsidies and military expenditures and less likely to be supportive of issues involving civil rights.

The poor guy left his paper, which he had been reading from on the podium. My professor came up to the podium after the presentation and picked the paper up like it was toxic waste with the comment "That was a very interesting diversion, but now let's get back to some thinking about political science." Half the room was ready to lynch my professor and half thought that the graduate student who had presented was stating what any observer would have concluded with a little bit of careful thought.