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Mar. 9th, 2004 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zana16The Bases of Growth in Taiwan
I’m a math major. The very first day of Stats class, the professor said, “Tell me what you want to prove, and I’ll make the data support your point.” Wading through the endless neoliberal vs. statist arguments, I get the feeling that the data is not objective; each author appears to interpret the same data in a way that proves what s/he is out to prove. And since I can’t see the data, I can’t look “objectively” at it and project my own biases into a conclusion, so what is there to do but wonder who is right? Of course, as a good postmodernist I take it as an authoritative imperative to distrust anyone who sets himself up as an authority--so pretty much none of them are right. One could say all the arguments are symptoms of a system oppressed by the patriarchy, but that would just be a transparent attempt to work in both “postmodernism” and “patriarchy” into a paper without actually saying anything.
... not done yet, but at least I'm getting there.
I’m a math major. The very first day of Stats class, the professor said, “Tell me what you want to prove, and I’ll make the data support your point.” Wading through the endless neoliberal vs. statist arguments, I get the feeling that the data is not objective; each author appears to interpret the same data in a way that proves what s/he is out to prove. And since I can’t see the data, I can’t look “objectively” at it and project my own biases into a conclusion, so what is there to do but wonder who is right? Of course, as a good postmodernist I take it as an authoritative imperative to distrust anyone who sets himself up as an authority--so pretty much none of them are right. One could say all the arguments are symptoms of a system oppressed by the patriarchy, but that would just be a transparent attempt to work in both “postmodernism” and “patriarchy” into a paper without actually saying anything.
... not done yet, but at least I'm getting there.