Tag: gerrymandering
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On statistics and democracy, or why exposing a fraud may mean nothing
“stat” in the word “statistics” means “state”, as in “government/sovereignty”. Statistics was born as a state effort to use data to rule a country. Even today, every country I know has its own statistics authority. For many years, many governments, have been hiding the true statistics from the public, under the assumption that knowledge means power. I was reminded of this after reading Charles Earl’s (my teammate) post “Mathematicians, rock the vote!”, in which he encourages mathematicians to fight gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a dubious practice in the American voting system, where a regulatory body forms voting districts in such a way that the party that appointed that body has the highest chance to win. Citing Charles: