Statistics are useless

One of the more interesting sections of TIME magazine is its statistics page. In it, you will find numbers that relate the relative abundance or the surprising amount of effort or money put into one endeavor or another. Statistics are considered among the most followed about and cared about facts that people have. They often quote numbers and percentages as arguments in favor or against their causes. Statistics have become a lifeline of the world’s governmental and political spheres.

And yet many of these statistics have problems. They are often times gathered by biased groups, or failing that, by neutral groups who do not have the time to feasibly collect the data in a manner that would not fall prey to obvious biases. Internet surveys, daily telephone calls, and reader response surveys all easily fall to biases. Data gathered for statistics may be skewed.

Still, this might not be a problem, because the methodology of statistics can correct for this. However, the problem is that the methodology of statistics is very limited in the results it can tell. It can only fail to reject a hypothesis or reject it, never prove a hypothesis. This means that the statistics are oftentimes meaningless. Worse, still the wording used by statistical junkies tend to be very heavily loaded or just flat out wrong. There are many terms of art in statistics that must be carefully said.

This does not mean that statistical study is absolutely without value. Clearly it is. But the abuse of statistics in today’s political and governmental affairs must be corrected for real progress to be made with the world’s problems. Otherwise we risk not only failing to solve these problems, but actually seeing them in the wrong light to begin with.

International terrorism

Terrorism has emerged as one of the most pressing issues of the 21st Century. Whereas previous centuries have seen other forms of violent conflict (most notably war and rebellion) as the main method by which countries and groups have attempted to influence politics through force, during the middle of the 20th century terrorism began to take center stage. The Vietnam War, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the French in Algeria and countless other examples highlighted the folly of full out warfare against insurgent forces. Asymmetrical warfare became the norm for combatants engaging against national governments around the world.

Terrorism is thus likely to be the main form of “conflict” in this century. Instead of events like World War II, military forces will be deployed primarily to engage against insurgencies and rebellions. National boundaries in most of the developed world are unlikely to change drastically, making the possibility of all out war in these areas unlikely and making violent terrorist actions the only method of conflict in these regions. Furthermore, poorer parts of the world are likely to resort to terrorism because of its low cost. Overall, terrorism will be sharply on the rise, if not due to specific groups, then due to the fact that in this century terrorist actions will be the main method by which what was once considered warfare will be waged.

Responses by varying national governments will be critical in stemming this tide of terrorism. Military force will have to be drastically rethought. The rolling waves of tanks and infantry of the last generation of warfare are unlikely to work in anything but the short term, making the nature of armed forces today relatively obsolete. The future will belong to national armies that have a small elite strike force that does most of the operations of today’s armies but with a much larger component of what could be considered peacekeepers: troops that can effectively occupy regions and subdue civilian populations while effectively filtering out insurgents. That task will be the hardest one for military forces of today.

Such a change is extremely complex. The techniques by which to prevent people from resorting to terrorism are not well known. As such, immediate changes to the armed forces are unlikely. However, the inevitable change is obvious: armies across the world will split primarily into three groups, an elite strike force similar to today’s armies, a support force designed to have a worldwide reach in information, and a large occupying force necessary to fight terrorism. As the likelihood of full out war and the need for the more obvious form of national defense decreases, such aspects of national armed forces will decrease.

There is one inherent danger that must be addressed. Citizens of the world must be on the lookout for occupational forces in armies. If they are not properly regulated and if their use is not heavily guarded, then they can be used to bring about totalitarian rule across the globe. Future civilians must heavily regulate the military to prevent that from happening, no matter the cost.