Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Death to Pluralism

This is a short blog, but I'm tired the inductive arguments of the pluralist camp. Their death comes from a qualitative describtion normal distributions, and the physical interpretations from the distribution's sharpness. (If you, do not know what a normal distribution is, wiki it.) Let suppose we have a rating system of 1-100. One being a fledgling tool, barely even a piece of technology and 100 a piece of technology that is a paragon of "the device paradigm", then let us have 10^4 people survey 10^4 different technological objects selected at random from a database of all technologies. The prepare a histogram plot of the survey. However the distribution and where the mean lies doesn't matter, if the peak is sharp and not a plateau then, clearly their is some paradigm to how technologies behaves and, with some certainty an N-number of individuals can take a random object (not surveyed) and the object's rating will statistically fall within error of one another. The pluralist view of, oh shit everything too complicated we have to look at case by case basis, is a weak cop-out instead of really analyzing the data.

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