The only constant in life is change.- Heraclitus
d.: Cal.E. is campaigning for Ruler of the Planet of the Talking Cats today, and she has a speech to deliver. That is why I decided to vent in our blog today. I started the blog off with a quote from a famous Greek philosopher because we all know that change is inevitable. However, not all change is good. Some change is bad and some change is neutral. My point is that change solely for the sake of change is often unnecessary. The world is changing, and it’s not all for the good.
If y’all haven’t realized this by now, we’re all being reduced to numbers on a page, not names and faces. That isn’t a good thing, in my opinion. Since I have a common name and, apparently, a popular birthday, I’ve been in situations where the only way to distinguish myself from someone else with the same name and date of birth was some type of number. And, if you believe that giving out your social security number in this situation is dangerous, think again. The odds are that the person asking for it already knows what it is, and that’s scary.
I’ve gone to grocery stores six months after my last visit, and the receipt will note that I purchased another item with the one I’m buying that day, so wouldn’t I like to purchase it again? And my phone is familiar enough with my schedule so well that it knows when to start charging its battery to keep from overcharging it. Convenient? Yes, but convenience has a price, and that price is our privacy. ( See paragraph above about one’s social security number which only the social security commission and the IRS are supposedly the only entities that are allowed to know that number besides you ). Speaking of numbers….
Mark Twain once famously said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” My point is that we’re all being reduced to statistics. Two of my favorite college courses were statistics and psychology. I once did an experiment that involved both. The experiment was simple: flip a coin one hundred times and see how many times it comes up heads and how many times it comes up tails. 50/50, right? Not exactly. The caveat was that I would pick which one I wanted the coin to land on. I can’t remember the exact number of times the coin came up heads when I picked heads, but I know that it was well over 60%. There was nothing magical or mystical about this experiment. When I noticed the coin landed on heads, I remembered how I’d flipped the coin, and proceeded to flip it that way a majority of the time. If it started on heads and landed on heads, that was the way I flipped it. The point is, statistics can be influenced, which brings me to my next point.
Imagine if the police agencies decided that, since nine out of ten people with red hair and green eyes (the rarest genetic combination) committed crimes, these are all bad people. Then, if the police put all the people who fit that description in prison, ninety percent of those people would be criminals. That’s a high percentage, and most people would think it to be a good thing, unless you happen to have red hair and green eyes. Further, since this is the rarest of genetic combinations (about two percent of the world’s population), it isn’t statistically relevant that ten percent of those people never committed a crime or were going to. To carry it a step further, why not just eliminate everyone who fits that description? That would drive the crime rate down, wouldn’t it?
If this is beginning to sound very familiar, you probably also know that a Pica Elite is a type of manual typewriter (i.e. close to my age or older). Some of the worst people who ever lived made their decisions based on statistics, and, if we aren’t careful, that’s what the world is coming to.
Cal.E. will be back tomorrow, and the blog will be on a lighter note. Until then, please give these words some thought.
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