Sunday’s New York Times provided this review of Proofiness – The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception – due for publication later this week. The cover, seen here in Amazon, depicts a stats wizard conjuring numbers out of thin air.
What caught my eye in the critique by Steven Strogatz – an applied mathematics professor at Cornell, was the deception caused by “disestimation” (as Proofiness author Seife terms it) of the results from Minnesota’s razor-thin 2008 Senate race, which Al Franken won by a razor-thin 0.0077 percent margin (225 votes out of 1.2 million counted) over Norm Coleman. Disestimation is the act of taking a number too literally, understating or ignoring the uncertainties that surround it; in other words, giving too much weight to a measurement, relative to its inherent error.
“A nice anecdote I like to talk about is a guide at the American Museum of Natural History, who’s pointing at the Tyrannosaurus rex. Someone asks, how old is it, and he says it’s 65 million and 38 years old. Sixty-five million and 38 years old, how do you know that? The guide says, well, when I started at this museum 38 years ago, a scientist told me it was 65 million years old. Therefore, now it’s 65 million and 38. That’s an act of disestimation. The 65 million was a very rough number, and he turned it into a precise number by thinking that the 38 has relevance when in fact the error involved in measuring the dinosaur was plus or minus 100,000 years. The 38 years is nothing.”
– Charles Seife (Source: This transcript of an interview by NPR.)
We Minnesotans would have saved a great deal of money if our election officials had simply tossed a coin to determine the outcome of the Franken-Coleman contest. Unfortunately, disestimation is embedded in our election laws, which are bound and determined to make every single vote count, even though many thousands in a State-wide race prove very difficult to decipher.