Gould's 'The Median is Not The Message'
I struggle with regularly writing original content. Not to say that I don't have thoughts and Ideas, but I don't often capture them or think that they deserve the longform format (or I can't be bothered to put in the effort. I am not impassioned enough by the idea to get fingers to keys). So in an attempt to not simply slip back into my poor habit of perpetual media consumption, I have set up a long list of 'Canon' works. They range from full books to short essays, and are roughly organized in clear groups, meant to be read in order.
This will be a series of quick notes, written immediately after or during reading. I promise neither quality nor length. The best that I can offer is existence.
(Note: I will not be posting it here. However, if you DM me on X I will send it to you. If you have recommendations for the Canon, please let me know).
The first work is Stephen Jay Gould's 'The Median is Not The Message' (a play on McLuhan's 'The Medium is The Message). This is a short essay by Evolutionary Biologist Stephen Jay Gould on the application of statistics in a personal an emotional way. He describes it as a sort of 'Holy War' against the idea that statistics and intellect is substandard or separate to feelings and emotion.
Gould explains that he was diagnosed with Cancer, and was not encouraged to look into the literature on it. When he immediately looked into the literature, he found the reason for this was that the median survival range for this form of Cancer was eight months. A positive attitude, a strong will, and a general Joie de Vivre tend to have positive effects on the outcomes of cancer patients, and so informing someone that their diagnoses was dire was a self-fulfilling infohazard. However, since Gould was a scientist, he knew better than to take the true statement of "The median life expectancy is eight months" to mean the common conclusion of "I'm probably going to be dead in eight months". He explains how he looked into what features made someone more likely to be on the right side of the median. Young, positive attitude, early diagnosis, great doctors, were all strong factors, and ones that he had. Side Note: I was talking about something similar to this recently. It is clear that in high dimensional spaces, you're probably going to be farther and farther from actually being the average. The case I was talking about was marriage, my friends moaning that half of marriages end in divorce. But, these people were my friends and are not representative of the average American. A rough calculation, but they were college educated, no kids before marriage, on their first marriage, had married parents, and were genuinely not impulsive people, it was likely that their future marriage only had a 10% divorce risk. End Side Note.
Gould then talks about understanding the skew of the distribution. While one half of people died within eight months, that meant that half of all people had to fit within a 0-8 month section, while the other half would fill anywhere from 8 months to functional old age. There was a long tail, and no reason Gould couldn't necessarily be the one in the tail. He lived for about 20 years after his diagnosis.
I thought this work was quite touching and well done. It is clear that Gould was incredibly well read, as the prose reads warm and smooth (I suppose only supporting the claim of the piece. Rare when the substance and the style are the same).
Favorite quotes:
"We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unĀambiguous ābeginning of lifeā or ādefinition of death,ā although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.)"
"Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions."
"It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity."