It was another hundred years before Quetelet began applying measures of central
tendency to social and human phenomena (Quetelet, 1842). The idea of applying
means to such situations was inspired partly by the surprising observation that
national rates of birth, marriage, and suicides—events that at one level were subject
to human choice—remained relatively stable from year to year. Some, including
Arbuthnot and De Moivre, had taken these stable rates as evidence of supernatural
design. Quetelet explained them by seeing collections of individual behaviors or
events as analogous to repeated observations. Thus, he regarded observing the
weights of 1,000 different men—weights that varied from man to man—as
analogous to weighing the same man 1,000 times, with the observed weight varying
from trial to trial. The legitimacy of such an analogy, of course, has been a heated
controversy in statistics. Even at the time, Quetelet’s ideas brought stiff rebukes
from thinkers such as Auguste Comte, who thought it ludicrous to believe that we
could rise above our ignorance of values of individual cases simply by averaging
many of them (Stigler, 1986, p. 194). To Comte, statistics applied to social
phenomena was computational mysticism.
It was another hundred years before Quetelet began applying measures of central
tendency to social and human phenomena (Quetelet, 1842). The idea of applying
means to such situations was inspired partly by the surprising observation that
national rates of birth, marriage, and suicides—events that at one level were subject
to human choice—remained relatively stable from year to year. Some, including
Arbuthnot and De Moivre, had taken these stable rates as evidence of supernatural
design. Quetelet explained them by seeing collections of individual behaviors or
events as analogous to repeated observations. Thus, he regarded observing the
weights of 1,000 different men—weights that varied from man to man—as
analogous to weighing the same man 1,000 times, with the observed weight varying
from trial to trial. The legitimacy of such an analogy, of course, has been a heated
controversy in statistics. Even at the time, Quetelet’s ideas brought stiff rebukes
from thinkers such as Auguste Comte, who thought it ludicrous to believe that we
could rise above our ignorance of values of individual cases simply by averaging
many of them (Stigler, 1986, p. 194). To Comte, statistics applied to social
phenomena was computational mysticism.
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