The reification of numbers: statistics and the distance between self, work, and others

We have been presenting papers at healthcare and medical conferences, workshops, and symposiums for many years, and have noticed an interesting phenomenon. Health professionals, particularly doctors, are acutely heedful of data in the form of tables and charts and less so of words and models. We have not seen this described before and we seek to label it “numerical supremacy syndrome.”

Have we become bored with the familiar?

When PowerPoint replaced traditional slides and overhead transparencies in the 1990s, it enabled many of us to provide information more accessibly within a clear narrative outline. Typically a conference talk of from 10 to 30 minutes will include several slides setting out what the talk is about or what the research involved. These initial ideas are invariably couched in words in “dot point” format and sometimes graphic depictions as models, flow charts, and the like.

Not all talks include data, but when they do the audience, especially medically trained participants, can be palpably seen to increase their concentration. Behavioural cues include becoming quieter, leaning forward, and attentively focusing on the slides. Once the numerical component of a presentation gives way once again to words in the form of some discussion or concluding remarks, attention again tends to be less intense.

A possible explanation, which we might construe in the form of a differential diagnosis, is that evidence based medicine may be becoming actualised. Medical training combined with urgings from advocates of evidence based medicine may have led to people putting much greater emphasis than before on assessing the quality and weighing the importance of data. But there may be a negative effect. The degree to which people in medicine respect statistics may be a function of the degree to which they live their lives “from a distance.” Our point is simple. Many people only respect evidence about clinical practice that is couched in the highly abstract language of graphs and statistical tables, which are themselves visualisations of abstract relations pertaining among types of numbers, themselves again abstractions about ordinary phenomena.

People pay relatively less attention to evidence that comes in the form of words. Why are they less enamoured to “hear” the import of case studies and ethnographies? Why do they reject these as anecdotal and continue to set store by “numerical representativeness” and “statistical significance”? Could it be that there is a kind of pathological denial of the acute relevance of ordinary language to describe who we are and what we do? Have we become bored with the familiar and inured to experience that might give us a clue as to what is happening behind the numbers?

In Nature's Numbers: Discovering Order and Pattern in the Universe (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), the mathematician Ian Stewart has talked of the thingyfication of mathematical processes. Numbers are abstractions: they have no real existence. Contrary to those who reify numbers as objects, there is, for instance, no number six or number two anywhere, just exemplars of them.

This raises questions of various kinds. Is the preference for numbers an attitude that arises from our not wanting to talk about ourselves and clinical practice in anything other than highly abstracted terms? Is it part of a thingyfication of numbers? Is it also indicative of the distance that people create between who we are, what we do, and how we talk about these things? Is the requirement for formal evidence an indicator of a generalised unwillingness on the part of the scientifically minded to deal with people, relationships, and practices?

Perhaps the syndrome needs to be systematically researched. When researchers complete a study in this area, they will seek to present their findings at a conference. Ironically, the audience may pay more attention to the data than the text, thereby elegantly proving the theory.