英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(5)（在线收听）

The emergence in the late 17th century of government advisers claiming scientific authority, rather than political or military acumen, represents the origins of the "expert" culture now so reviled by populists. These path-breaking individuals were neither pure scholars nor government officials, but hovered somewhere between the two. They were enthusiastic amateurs who offered a new way of thinking about populations that privileged aggregates and objective facts. Thanks to their mathematical prowess, they believed they could calculate what would otherwise require a vast census to discover.

17世纪晚期出现的政府顾问声称自己拥有科学权威，而不是政治或军事智慧，这代表了如今被民粹主义者痛斥的“专家”文化的起源。这些开创性的人既不是纯粹的学者，也不是政府官员，而是介于两者之间。他们是热情的业余爱好者，他们提供了一种新的方式来思考特权人口总数和客观事实。多亏了他们高超的数学能力，他们相信自己能够计算出需要大量人口普查才能发现的东西。

There was initially only one client for this type of expertise, and the clue is in the word "statistics". Only centralised nation states had the capacity to collect data across large populations in a standardised fashion and only states had any need for such data in the first place. Over the second half of the 18th century, European states began to collect more statistics of the sort that would appear familiar to us today. Casting an eye over national populations, states became focused upon a range of quantities: births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, harvests, imports, exports, price fluctuations. Things that would previously have been registered locally and variously at parish level became aggregated at a national level.

最初，这类专业知识只有一个客户，线索就在“统计”这个词中。只有中央集权的国家才有能力以一种标准化的方式收集大量人口的数据，而且也只有国家一开始就需要这些数据。18世纪下半叶，欧洲国家开始收集更多的统计数据，这些数据在我们今天看来很熟悉。各国着眼于本国人口，开始集中关注一系列数据：出生、死亡、洗礼、结婚、收成、进口、出口、价格波动。以前在地方和教区一级登记的东西现在集中到全国一级。

New techniques were developed to represent these indicators, which exploited both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the page, laying out data in matrices and tables, just as merchants had done with the development of standardised book-keeping techniques in the late 15th century. Organising numbers into rows and columns offered a powerful new way of displaying the attributes of a given society. Large, complex issues could now be surveyed simply by scanning the data laid out geometrically across a single page.

新的技术被开发出来来表现这些指标，利用了页面的垂直和水平维度，用矩阵和表格来排列数据，就像商人在15世纪晚期发展标准化簿记技术所做的那样。将数字排列成行和列提供了一种显示特定社会属性的强大的新方式。现在，大而复杂的问题可以通过扫描以几何形式排列在单页上的数据来进行调查。