英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(16)（在线收听）

On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as "sharing economy" platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics. What is less clear is how the benefits of digital analytics might ever be offered to the public, in the way that many statistical data sets are. Bodies such as the Open Data Institute, co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee, campaign to make data publicly available, but have little leverage over the corporations where so much of our data now accumulates. Statistics began life as a tool through which the state could view society, but gradually developed into something that academics, civic reformers and businesses had a stake in. But for many data analytics firms, secrecy surrounding methods and sources of data is a competitive advantage that they will not give up voluntarily.

一方面，值得承认的是，长期存在的政治机构有能力予以反击。正如优步和爱彼迎等“共享经济”平台最近受到法律裁决的阻挠(优步被迫承认司机是雇员，爱彼迎被一些市政当局完全禁止)，隐私和人权法律是数据分析扩展的潜在障碍。数据分析的好处如何以许多统计数据集的方式提供给公众，这一点我们不太清楚。由蒂姆·伯纳斯-李联合创立的“开放数据研究所”等机构致力于让数据公开，但这对如今积累了很多数据的企业并没有什么影响力。统计一开始是国家用来观察社会的工具，但逐渐发展成了和学者、公民改革者和企业都利害攸关的东西。但对于许多数据分析公司来说，对数据方法和来源保密是一种竞争优势，它们不会自愿放弃这种优势。

A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment. The experts who produce and use them have become painted as arrogant and oblivious to the emotional and local dimensions of politics. No doubt there are ways in which data collection could be adapted to reflect lived experiences better. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.

后统计社会是一个可怕的潜在命题，不是因为它会完全缺乏任何形式的真相或专业知识，而是因为这会将它们彻底私有化。统计学是自由主义、甚至是启蒙运动的众多支柱之一。制作和使用它们的专家们被描绘成傲慢自大、无视政治情感和地方层面之人。毫无疑问，有很多方法可以使数据收集更好地反映生活经验。但长期而言，需要进行的斗争不是精英主导的事实政治与民粹主义政治之间的斗争，而是那些仍致力于公共知识和公共辩论的人和那些正在瓦解这些东西的人之间的斗争。