Correlations and Stories

Neil Postman's Moral Theology and The Power of Storytelling

Critiques of quantitative social science, like Rossi’s Metallic Laws, ring as true today as they did in the 1980s. In the face of such a credibility crisis, quant researchers doubled down. Roughly, the 1990s saw a refinement of methodology, the 2000s a rise of accessible computing, and the 2010s an explosion in data and reproducibility. These were reasonable responses. And yet, they still all fell short. I’ve been banging the drum on this blog that we need to step back and think about why more datafication, quantification, and computerization haven't fixed the issues raised 40 years ago.

Any time I write about the fundamental shortcomings of the quantitative socioscientific program, I’m asked, “What’s your alternative, dude?” The desire for a dichotomous alternative is misguided. Instead, we can perhaps come to terms with what quantitative social scientists do. Neil Postman articulated this better than I can in his 1988 essay “Social Science as Moral Theology.”

The preface to the essay makes the case succinctly:

“There is a measure of cultural self-delusion in the prevalent belief that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other moral theologians are doing something different from storytelling.”

Why storytelling and not science? Postman points out that much of what quantitative social science claims as scientific is actually just counting. Counting things, he argues, does not make one a scientist.

“All sorts of people count things in order to achieve precision without claiming that they are scientists. Detectives and bail bondsmen count the number of murders committed in their city; judges count the number of divorce actions in their jurisdictions; business executives count the amount of money spent in their stores; and young children like to count their toes and fingers in order not to be vague about how many they have.”

Why then do social scientists insist on being scientists? It’s pretty simple. There was (is?) a cultural admiration of the scientist and a general disdain of the bureaucrat. Arguing for policy was hence given more authority when couched in scientific language.

The issue, of course, is that policies cannot be deduced scientifically. Social policy dictates what a society believes it ought to do. It is a manifestation of communal values. Using the language of science to advocate policy leaned on a quasi-religious faith in the possibility of scientific progress. In the 20th century, people had become disposed to trust the scientist more than the priest, and hence academics decided it was best to argue for policy in the language of science rather than the language of faith.

But these arguments for policy were just that: rhetoric. They were tales of what we should do told with tabular asterisks and scatter plots. Hence, the term moral theology. Postman wanted social scientists to embrace their role as storytellers who championed human values.

Postman’s moral theology takes on multiple meanings. It highlights how social scientific studies are themselves built upon faith. You have to believe in the existence of a population. You have to imbue meaning in counterfactual quantities. You have to believe that there are no unobserved confounders. Faith in these constructs allows social scientists to stitch together narratives about how we should organize society.

Moral theology also serves to contrast against academic ethics, which is held up as a rational artifact. Academic ethics is either derived from first principles in the catacombs of the philosophy department or laid out as bullet points by a solemn committee appointed by a professional organization. Moral theology, on the other hand, is not a rational morality. The numbers and tables and figures don’t let us deduce moral actions from first principles. Instead, social scientists use them rhetorically to shape and guide norms.

Quantitative social science, like all academic endeavors, has a set of rituals that persist for cultural, not rational reasons. There is a “right” way to tell quantitative stories. Data science courses teach the catechism of the church of counting things. These statistical tests are blessed. These visualization tools are blessed. Data is better than anecdata. Correlation does not imply causation, amen.

Postman’s moral theology is thus akin to parable and fable. Stories capture something authors want us to see, think about, and grapple with. They challenge our beliefs about how we want to live our lives. The moral theology of social science is a patchwork of stories about the world that study authors would like to occupy. The authors now send these stories to each other as PDFs. The stories reveal aspects of the world we live in that are not as ideal as they could be.

Postman sharply argues:

“So there are differences among storytellers, and most of the time our novelists are more pleasurable to read. But the stories told by our social researchers are at least as compelling and, in our own times, apparently more credible.”

Quantitative social science is a particular form of storytelling with outsized cultural cachet in the information age. And Postman’s framing explains why data-driven punditry rules the world. Matt Yglesias exists because he constantly props up middlebrow centrist bullshit with charts and poll results. John Burn-Murdoch has made a career by threading plots with the FT color scheme on Twitter, telling surprising stories. Our World in Data tells us about the joy of modern progress through its interactive figures. Even our sports debates are filtered through the language of esoteric counts you’d never thought of before.

Instead of an alternative to quantitative social science, Postman is asking for an honest assessment of what quantitative social science is.

“Whereas Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh shows us the idle and conspicuously consuming rich, Thorstein Veblen argues them into existence. In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulberg showed us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has recently tried to explain through sociological analysis.

Stories told with correlations are still just stories. They encapsulate the message the social scientist wants to convey. They can’t be dispassionate and objective. There is a reason these papers are written. The personal experiences and observations of the authors are the unobserved confounders in every study they conduct.

Postman wants us to publicly concede that all we have are correlations and stories. But we get to choose which stories we tell.