英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(15)（在线收听）

Few social findings arising from this kind of data analytics ever end up in the public domain. This means that it does very little to help anchor political narrative in any shared reality. With the authority of statistics waning, and nothing stepping into the public sphere to replace it, people can live in whatever imagined community they feel most aligned to and willing to believe in. Where statistics can be used to correct faulty claims about the economy or society or population, in an age of data analytics there are few mechanisms to prevent people from giving way to their instinctive reactions or emotional prejudices. On the contrary, companies such as Cambridge Analytica treat those feelings as things to be tracked.

由这类数据分析得出的社会发现最后很少能够进入公共领域，这说明它对巩固共享现实中的政治叙事的作用少之又少。随着统计数据的权威逐渐衰落，没有什么东西能够进入公共领域取代它，人们可以生活在任何他们觉得与自己最一致以及最愿意相信的想象中的社区。统计数据可以用来纠正有关经济、社会或人口的错误说法，但在数据分析时代，几乎没有什么机制可以阻止人们屈服于本能反应或情感偏见。相反，剑桥分析公司等公司将这些情绪视为需要追踪的东西。

But even if there were an Office for Data Analytics, acting on behalf of the public and government as the ONS does, it is not clear that it would offer the kind of neutral perspective that liberals today are struggling to defend. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.

即使有这么一个数据分析办公室，它能够像英国国家统计局那样代表公众和政府行事，但它是否会秉持当今自由主义者竭力捍卫的那种中立观点尚不可知。这种新的数字处理设备非常适合探测趋势、感知情绪以及在事物发酵时发现它们。它能够很好地服务于竞选经理和营销人员，但它不太适合对社会做出明确、客观、可能形成共识的主张，而统计学家和经济学家是为此付费的。

In this new technical and political climate, it will fall to the new digital elite to identify the facts, projections and truth amid the rushing stream of data that results. Whether indicators such as GDP and unemployment continue to carry political clout remains to be seen, but if they don't, it won't necessarily herald the end of experts, less still the end of truth. The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy.

在这种新的技术和新的政治氛围下，在纷繁复杂的数据流中识别事实、预测和真相的任务将落在新的数字精英们身上。国内生产总值和失业率等指标是否依旧具有政治影响力还有待观察，但如果没有，这未必预示着专家的末日，更不用说真相的末日了。既然数字不断在我们背后和我们不了解的情况下产生，我们就应该更认真地对待这个问题，这就是统计危机留给代议制民主的地方。