The Jinn and the Statistician

"A very businesslike paperboy knocked on the door of a house," Swara began the story after saying Basmalah and greeting with Salaam, "and when an old woman answered, he demanded, 'You haven’t paid for your paper all month. Pay up right now or you’re off the route, and you’ll be hearing from our collection agency.'

The woman looked around her yard and calmly answered, 'O son ... I’ve paid you every week, in much the same way you deliver my newspaper. Look. There’s a payment envelope in the bushes to the left, one in the bushes to the right, one up in the gutter of the porch, and one in the hole in my living room window.'"

"And the next day," Swara continued, "Frog visited Toad's house, to fulfill, the story he had told.

'Once upon a time, in a country, where after a Reformation, it was agreed upon them, that their Head of State—and he was equipped with weapons and all kinds of devices, that were expected to help him to carry out his duties—apart from running and managing the government with a limited term of office, was also the guardian and custodian of the good moral values. But unfortunately, among the state civil apparatus—of couse not all of them, who should work for the progress and prosperity of the people, on one hand, emerged—a kind of moral decandency—a term—along with the related words hedonist and hedonistic—derived from the Greek word hedone, 'pleasure.' On the other hand, there was such thing so-called violence or pain, unfolded. Usually, the two appear together, or one of the two, comes first..

When speaking about the birth of Hedonism, Kurt Lampe told us a Cyrenaic parable, 'If we are to believe Xenophon [of Athens], Socrates did not entirely approve of Aristippus of Cyrene. Xenophon and Aristippus were both among the crowd of young men who passed their leisure time with Socrates. However, Xenophon felt that he and Socrates agreed on the importance of self-control, which was the foundation of responsible management of one’s body, soul, household, relationships, and polis. By contrast, he narrates how Socrates 'had noticed that one of his companions [i.e., Aristippus] was rather self-indulgent' with regard to food, drink, sex, sleep, cold, heat, and hard work. So Socrates tries to show Aristippus the error of his ways. His admonishment concludes by recalling the wisdom of the poets Hesiod and Epicharmus, who concur that sweat and suffering are the price of all good things. He then paraphrases Prodicus’s story about 'the choice of Heracles,' in which the hero is confronted with two allegorical figures. The figure of Vice promises every sort of pleasure without effort, while Virtue reiterates that there is no happiness without exertion. Socrates does not tell us which choice Heracles made, but we all know he chose the path of suffering and glorious virtue. The question is, which choice did Aristippus make?

Xenophon’s way of presenting Aristippus leads most readers to conclude that he chose the path of easy pleasure. Of course, this is not a reliable account of the historical Aristippus’s thoughts. It is a fiction colored by Xenophon’s opinions of Aristippus and Socrates and his own conceptions of virtue, vice, pleasure, and happiness. But it is a useful parable for thinking about the impetus behind the philosophical movement Aristippus started. That movement is called 'Cyrenaic' after Cyrene, the polis in North Africa where most of the movement’s participants were born. Although the Cyrenaics do not associate pleasure with vice, Xenophon is right to represent Cyrenaic philosophy as the choice of pleasure. The Cyrenaics reflectively affirm their intuitive attraction to pleasure and commit themselves to working through this decision’s life-shaping consequences.

here are two aspects of this hedonism, in the eyes of Lampe. First, many of the Cyrenaics’ fundamental beliefs and arguments revolve around pleasure and pain. In particular, they all agree that either bodily or mental pleasure is the greatest and most certain intrinsic good. We might call this, formal hedonism. Second, they actually indulge in all sorts of everyday pleasures such as food and sex. In other words, notwithstanding disagreements among members of the movement, in general it is not by sober parsimony or self-restraint that they attempt to live pleasantly. In this, they differ (at least in degree) from many formal hedonists, including their competitors and eventual successors, the Epicureans. We might call this everyday hedonism.

In fact we can plausibly think of Cyrenaic philosophy as the first attempt in the European tradition, to formalize everyday hedonism with increasingly systematic theories. The Cyrenaics were obviously not the first to claim that pleasure is a good thing; indeed, pleasure’s supposedly universal appeal is the foundation of their reflective choice. Nor were they the first thinkers to grant pleasure an important theoretical position. It seems that Democritus, for example, gave both 'pleasure' (hēdonē) and 'delight' (terpsis) thematic prominence in his ethical writings. Moreover, among Aristippus’s approximate contemporaries were Eudoxus of Cnidus, who elaborated his hedonism within Plato’s Academy, and the lamentably shadowy Polyarchus, 'The Voluptuary' of Syracuse. But the Cyrenaic tradition clearly involves a much more sustained investigation of hedonism than any of these. It is thus, with some justice that the Cyrenaics have sometimes been represented as the originators of the tradition of philosophical hedonism in Europe.

It was also mentioned, there was a statistician, while driving his Rubicon Jeep—don't ask where he gained it, and don't ask why suddenly a middle-aged woman, who is known to get angry when she's at work, on social media, was recorded (or purposely recorded?) washing a car, and according to the netizens, the road tax hasn't been paid—along the highway, something caught his attention. But before I move on, you may ask, why choose statistics in this context?

In fact, information is beautiful, and so are Statistics. Statistics is the most exciting of disciplines. A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may work as employees or as statistical consultants. David John Hand, a British statistician, tells us, 'One good working definition of statistics might be that it is the technology of extracting meaning from data. However, no definition is perfect. In particular, this definition makes no reference to chance and probability, which are the mainstays of many applications of statistics. So another working definition might be that it is the technology of handling uncertainty. Yet other definitions, or more precise definitions, might put more emphasis on the roles that statistics plays. Thus we might say that statistics is the key discipline for predicting the future or for making inferences about the unknown, or for producing convenient summaries of data. Taken together these definitions broadly cover the essence of the discipline, though different applications will provide very different manifestations. For example, decision-making, forecasting, real-time monitoring, fraud detection, census enumeration, and analysis of gene sequences are all applications of statistics, and yet may require very different methods and tools. One thing to note about these definitions is that I have deliberately chosen the word ‘technology’ rather than science. A technology is the application of science and its discoveries, and that is what statistics is: the application of our understanding of how to extract information from data, and our understanding of uncertainty. Nevertheless, statistics is sometimes referred to as a science. Indeed, one of the most stimulating statistical journals is called just that: Statistical Science.'

But the word ‘statistics,’ in David Hand's view, also has another meaning: it is the plural of ‘statistic’. A statistic is a numerical fact or summary. For example, a summary of the data describing some population: perhaps its size, the birth rate, or the crime rate. So, what we are talking, in one sense, it is about individual numerical facts. But in a very real sense, it is about much more than that. It is about how to collect, manipulate, analyse, and deduce things from those numerical facts. It is about the technology itself. I'm not intending to present tables of number, but rather to emphasize the importance of how businesses make decisions, of how astronomers discover new types of stars, of how medical researchers identify the genes associated with a particular disease, of how banks decide whether or not to give someone a credit card, of how insurance companies decide on the cost of a premium, of how to construct spam filters which prevent obscene advertisements reaching your email inbox, and so on and on.

No aspect of modern life is untouched by statistics. Modern medicine is built on it: for example, the randomized controlled trial has been described as ‘one of the simplest, most powerful, and revolutionary tools of research’. Understanding the processes by which plagues spread prevent them from decimating humanity. Effective government hinges on careful statistical analysis of data describing the economy and society: perhaps that is an argument for insisting that all those in government should take mandatory statistics courses. Farmers, food technologists, and supermarkets all implicitly use statistics to decide what to grow, how to process it, and how to package and distribute it. Hydrologists decide how high to build flood defences by analysing meteorological statistics. Engineers building computer systems use the statistics of reliability to ensure that they do not crash too often. Air traffic control systems are built on complex statistical models, working in real time. Although you may not recognize it, statistical ideas and tools are hidden in just about every aspect of modern life.

The remark that there are ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’, has been variously attributed to Mark Twain and Benjamin Disraeli, among others. There is much suspicion of statistics, says David Hand. We might also wonder if there is an element of fear of the discipline. It is certainly true that the statistician often plays the role of someone who must exercise caution, possibly even being the bearer of bad news. Statisticians working in research environments, for example in medical schools or social contexts, may well have to explain that the data are inadequate to answer a particular question, or simply that the answer is not what the researcher wanted to hear. That may be unfortunate from the researcher’s perspective, but it is a little unfair then to blame the statistical messenger.

In many cases, suspicion is generated by those who selectively choose statistics. If there is more than one way to summarize a set of data, all looking at slightly different aspects, then different people can choose to emphasize different summaries. A particular example is in crime statistics. In Britain, David Hand gives an example, perhaps the most important source of crime statistics is the British Crime Survey. This estimates the level of crime by directly asking a sample of people of which crimes they have been victims over the past year. In contrast, the Recorded Crime Statistics series includes all offences notifiable to the Home Office which have been recorded by the police. By definition, this excludes certain minor offences. More importantly, of course, it excludes crimes which are not reported to the police in the first place. With such differences, it is no wonder that the figures can differ between the two sets of statistics, even to the extent that certain categories of crime may appear to be decreasing over time according to one set of figures but increasing according to the other.

The crime statistics figures also illustrate another potential cause of suspicion of statistics, says David Hand. When a particular measure is used as an indicator of the performance of a system, people may choose to target that measure, improving its value but at the cost of other aspects of the system. The chosen measure then improves disproportionately, and becomes useless as a measure of performance of the system. For example, the police could reduce the rate of shoplifting by focusing all their resources on it, at the cost of allowing other kinds of crime to rise. As a result, the rate of shoplifting becomes useless as an indicator of crime rate. This phenomenon has been termed ‘Goodhart’s law’, named after Charles Goodhart, a former Chief Adviser to the Bank of England.

The point to all this is that the problem lies not with the statistics per se, but with the use made of those statistics, and the misunderstanding of how the statistics are produced and what they really mean. Perhaps it is perfectly natural to be suspicious of things we do not understand. The solution is to dispel that lack of understanding.

And so, something shiny, down there, by the creek, stirred the statistician's mind, turning his car off the highway. Once there, he scrambled out of his Jeep, crouched down, removed his Tom Cruise resemblance sunglasses in Maverick, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and then picked up the shiny object. A small bottle the size of the palm of his hand, and that's 'çesm-i bülbül,' the nightingale's eye.

He watched it for a moment, and immediately did as the Scientist and the General had done. He held the bottle under the river flow, turning it round and round. The glass became blue, threaded with opaque white canes, cobalt-blue, darkly bright, gleaming and wonderful. He turned it and turned it, rubbing the tenacious mud with thumbs and fingers, and suddenly it stopper, a faint glassy grinding, suddenly flew out of the neck of the flask and fell, tinkling but unbroken, on the edge of the creek, over the pebbles. And out of the bottle in his hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was? The dark cloud gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma, out of the bottle. I am seeing things, he thought, and found an enormous toe, then a foot with five toes as high as he was. He followed that form, from the bottom up, starting from the feet, knees, thighs, abdomen, chest, and head. Standing there, a man who put his hands on his hips. Like Superman, but this one was baldhead.

Without hesitation, the Statistician said, 'You must be the Jinn.' And before the jinn replied, he interrupted, 'You will offer me three wishes with terms and conditions. Right?'

The jinn said, 'Yes!' and before he could speak again, the Statistician cut him off, 'I need you to confess something!'

'What's that!' asked the Jinn.

'You are the Jin in Sir Richard Francis Burton's One Thousand and One Nights, right?' the statistician asked back.

'You should admit, you are not an Arabian Djinn, but merely an adaptation of Persian Jinn mythology, right?' said the statistician.

'Yes, I admit it. But that's not the point, now I'm waiting for you to tell me your wishes,' said the Jinn.

'Indeed, I do have wishes, but let me tell you a story,

'There was once an Emperor who loved his hair above everything else, and happy. But there was a secret, hidden by the emperor, that he actually, totally bald. No one knew it, because he wore wigs. Of course, there were imperial hairdresser and barber, but not to serve the Emperor, but to the members of the imperial family.

One day, a traveling salesman, offered him some 'Magic Hair Potion.' The Emperor bought it and began to rub it on his head, every day. And a few days later, he asked his trusted advisor if it was working well or not. Out of fear, the two trusted advisors—of their resemblance to one another, the Emperor called one of them, Eleven, and the other, Twelve—told the emperor, that the potion worked very well, even the hair on his head grew fast and thick. They lied so much, they even believed to their own lies. The Emperor was surpised, and said, ''Call the barber and stylist, I want them to cut and style my new hair!'

So, they came as the Emperor's ordered. At first, they were confused, but Eleven and Twelve gave hinted that they had to please the Emperor, or else their heads would be at stake. They told the Emperor that his hair was very thick and easy to style, and they moved their hands as if they were trimming and styling the Emperor's hair. The Emperor was satisfied, and decided, 'Prepare for a parade, I will walk the streets and show off my new hair.' And all the Emperor's men, couldn't say anything but, 'As you wish, sire!'

Then the streets were lined with hundreds of people who oohed! and aahed! over the emperor’s invisible new hair—for none of them wanted to admit it. Suddenly, a little boy’s shrill voice rose over the applause of the crowd. 'But the emperor's has no hair!' the child shouted. 'He has no hair at all, a.k.a baldhead!' Suddenly there was a stunned silence and the little boy found that hundreds of pairs of eyes were staring at him. Then someone sniggered… someone else tried to stifle a giggle… another person guffawed and snorted… and the whole crowd burst out into uncontrollable peals of laughter. They talked to each other, 'We don't need the Emperor's new hair ... we need an Emperor with new mind!'

'And now,' said the jinn, 'give me your wish!'

But the statistician smiled and said, 'I have only one wish, and the wish is 'I want you' and you alone!'

'It's impossible!' replied the jinn.

Calmly, the Statistician showed the bottle on his right hand, and the stopper on his left hand, 'With me or ... without me!' said he started to move the stopper into the bottle.

'Okay ... okay! I give up!' said the Jinn.

'Now you follow me, and obey me!' And so, the Statistician spurred his Jeep followed by the Jinn, to a town where the people would vote for a mayor. The jin was chanting,

There is no political solution

To our troubled evolution

Have no faith in constitution

There is no bloody revolution

We are spirits in the material world

Our so-called leaders speak

With words, they try to jail ya

They subjugate the meek

But it's the rhetoric of failure

We are spirits in the material world

Where does the answer lie?

Living from day to day

If it's something we can't buy

There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world *)

'Frog ended the story by saying, 'That's all Toad!'"

Swara concluded with a breaking news, 'There will be 8 stadiums funded by FIFA in a city at Borneo. And the football commentators reacted, 'They're going to dupe you!' And Allah know best."

Citations & References:
- Kurt Lampe, The Birth of Hedonism, Princeton University Press
- David J. Hand, Statistics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press
*) "Spirits in the Material World" written by Gordon Summers

Bahasa