Work Text:
Cover letter attached to the report that follows:
The following documents are excerpts from the evidence submitted for an inquiry into the activities of a group of saboteurs known as the 'Georg family'. We, the Georg Working Committee, believe that this group constitutes a serious threat to the field of statistics, and thus to our organization as a whole.
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Email from Charlotte Cavatica.
Hey Will,
How are things going? Did you listen to the Brené Brown CDs I sent you yet? I thought it was relevant to your current research. And also (sorry if I'm overstepping here) maybe the creative stuff you've been going through as well.
I've got some big news. Are you ready for this? I already told you I was planning to quit my job and start a freelance business where I'd have more creative control and less search engine optimization. I've just discovered that I'm starting another major project too. I'm going to be a mother!
You're the first to know. The father has concluded his involvement. :) Did I mention creative control?
I still don't know what I want to do about the job. I think I'll take the full family leave and then just straight up quit. I don't want to pour my whole life into yet another huge viral web advertising campaign and end up so exhausted I'll die giving birth or something.
Let me know how you're doing, k? We should meet up.
xxoo
Charlotte.
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From an op-ed in the Daily Globe
The factoid reported by our friends at the Daily Bugle, that "the average citizen is menaced by Spider-Man three times per year," is based on a faulty understanding of statistics. The average citizen is not troubled by Spider-Man at all, and may go about their business in our great city without alarm.
Doctor Otto Georg Octavius, best known by his alias 'Doctor Octopus', a resident of New York City who attacks Spider-Man thousands of times per year, causing billions of dollars in property damage, is an outlier, and Spider-Man should not be held accountable for his crimes.
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Email from Wilbur York.
Hi Charlotte,
Yes, I listened to the CDs. I'm not sure quite what you meant about the relevance to my research and creativity. Are you implying I should be switching to a grounded theory approach? As a statistician? I really don't think that's going to fly with the Department of Commerce when I get my PhD and leave the frying pan of academia for the fire of government work. Or, I guess, the dinner plate of corporate work.
Besides, there's something very pure about mathematical models. A well-formed question gets a meaningful answer and ahahahaha I'm sorry, I can't keep a straight face typing that. I started laughing so hard that my copy of How To Lie With Statistics nearly fell off the shelf above me onto my head.
All the same, I'm sticking with my quantitative methods. Like a stick-in-the-mud, you'll say. But it's what makes sense to me. Even though I see how the sausage is made and have no great reverence left, I don't think the solution is to deregulate the industry. So to speak. Well, I'll stay here wading in my mud, and you can swing by a thread above me. You've always been more daring than me.
Meanwhile, since you asked about my writing, I am doing NaNoWriMo this year. You'll be unsurprised to learn that I take a great satisfaction in writing my 1667 words every day (even when the effort is more like grunting than writing) and seeing my spreadsheet reflect the changes.
Congratulations on your news. That's very exciting. It's going to be hard, though, being a single mother and starting up a business at the same time. Let me know what I can do to support you.
Wilbur.
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Seen on Passive Aggressive Notes, with the comment "Yes, she hand-wrote the emoji."
Hi roomies!!!
I tried to call a house meeting so we could talk face to face, but nobody came. ;___; So I'm addressing this here on the fridge because I know you'll all see it here, lol.
Here's the thing. I know I said everyone could share my dishes, since I moved in here first. But clearly that's not working out. This morning when I got home from my shift there were no plates or bowls at all for me to eat off. Adn it's not the first time. :/
So I did a quick "inspection" ^___^ I expected you'd all have two or three in your rooms, ino these things happen lol. But I was surprised to find that all of you have been very good except for a CERTAIN PERSON, not mentioning any names, who had every single dish in his room including some that went missing the first day he moved in!!!
From now on everybody is allowed to share my dishes except Georg, who has to provide his own. I'm sorry, but it's the fairest way. The only other option is for everyone to use their own dishes and keep them in their rooms when not cooking or serving. So we're trying it this way, k?
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Email from Charlotte Cavatica.
Hey Will.
I'm so glad you're writing. If your metaphors in that email are any guide, you seem to be on form. I hope you win eternal glory at NaNoWriMo, but however many words you write will be more than if you did nothing and you'll be a winner in my eyes.
I didn't mean to insult your research. I really did just mean you're very hard on yourself and could stand to practice self-compassion, and that maybe it'd help to hear it from an empiricist. :(
Drafting my resignation letter. I'll tell the boss in person, but I want to have it written first.
xxoo
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From an unpublished work by Lois McMaster Bujold:
Delia Vorkosigan took a deep breath. "Sire, my Lords, my petition is as follows: I am more fit than my elder brother to serve Vorkosigan District. My older brother is entirely too busy obsessing about butter bugs to fulfill his duty."
Count Vorpatril scoffed. "Vorkosigans are all obsessed with those damn bugs."
"That's not true," Delia said calmly. "It's a statistical fallacy." Her great-grandmother and namesake had taught her family these things. "The average Vorkosigan hates butter bugs and thinks they're disgusting. My brother 'Butter Bug' Georg Vorkosigan, who takes after his great-uncle Mark entirely too much and eats ten thousand of them a day, is an outlier and should not be Count."
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Email from Wilbur York.
Good luck with your resignation letter. That sounds hard.
I'm plugging away at my NaNo. Trying not to be daunted by the High Achievers Thread on the forums. There are people pledged to write a million words in thirty days. That's 33,334 words per day. And it seems some of them have done that in the past (at what risk to their tendons I can only guess.)
I know the point is to write more words than I would have if I didn't write, but it does discourage me when they write more in five days than I write in three years.
Still doing my coursework, on top of the two hours a day of novel writing (which will be good practice for the dissertation, I keep telling myself.) Something odd happened today. My supervisor Fern shut the door and said in a hoarse whisper "Discard any responses from people named Georg." I was confused, because I haven't been surveying anyone at the moment, and she added "In general. Ever."
It turns out there's been a person or persons deliberately skewing survey data by inserting themselves into the control and making false reports or generating false physical evidence.
I'm acutely aware of confounding factors and how social indicators can create perverse incentives and wreck the social systems and the data along with them (Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.")
But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here. Whoever's doing this seems to be doing it for fun. Or out of some compulsion to make statisticians' lives harder. Weird. The truly odd thing is that he seems to use his real name. Like signing his work.
All the same, I don't think discarding all survey responses by people named Georg is going to make the results less distorted.
Wilbur.
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Malati @drmalatisethi
Tried to prove 'Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow' by dissecting about ten thousand bug eyeballs. Sry bugs #overlyhonestmethods
Lee Krukowski @leedoingscience
Studied change in avg bug eyeball orders per doctoral candidate on campus. Topic chosen b/c my gf is a biologist. #overlyhonestmethods
Too Cool For U @beersnob214
.@drmalatisethi @leedoingscience #TodayILearned doctoral candidates dissect a lot of bug eyeballs. #overlyhonestmethods
Lee Krukowski @leedoingscience
.@beersnob214 Not really. Even after eliminating @drmalatisethi I couldn't make the data make sense.
Lee Krukowski @leedoingscience
I uploaded my data-crunching script to GitHub in case someone else could see a problem, but no one could. #fml #overlyhonestmethods
Lee Krukowski @leedoingscience
Near as I can tell, someone's hoarding bug eyeballs. #overlyhonestmethods
Lee Krukowski @leedoingscience
And it isn't @drmalatisethi, I know about her bug thing already O.o #overlyhonestmethods
Malati @drmalatisethi
@leedoingscience hdu, I am not the one who stuck a plush isopod to the fridge. #justsayin
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Email from Charlotte Cavatica.
Wilbur, don't you even think about those people on the high achievers thread. They are outliers, liars, and out-and-out liars. There's one guy there who uses a computer to generate a million words of total gibberish every year, and claims it's avant-garde art. Come to think about it, I think his name was Georg too.
I told my boss what was up. Scary stuff, but she was great. Told me I'd outgrown the company and needed to shed it like an old skin. So many frustrated creative people working here. So that went well. All the same, it feels like jumping out of a plane and hoping my parachute opens in time.
I'm glad I had a grandmother who was a writer, and that Mom named me after her. I wish I'd known her. I like to think she's watching over me. Like she watched over your granddad in the court case, when her testimony saved him. Did I ever tell you what he said about her, when I stayed with you over summer in fifth grade? "It is not often that someone comes along who is both a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." I want to live up to that. Like you do. Maybe I don't tell you that often enough.
xxoo
Charlotte.
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From the USA Social Security Administration's Baby Names page (http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/)
Popularity of a Name
Errata:
Georg is not in the top 1000 male names for any year of birth in the last 14 years. Social Security Fraud Georg, who registered his own birth 10,000 times every year from 1990 to the present, is an outlier adn has been removed from the lists.
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From Amazon.com.
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From the council's response to the Georg Working Committee:
Having examined the evidence, this council finds that the 'Georg family' are indeed ruining surveys worldwide. This council is faced with two conundrums, one methodological and one philosophical. Clearly the Georg phenomenon requires urgent study so that we can account for the Georg factor when analyzing all data. The methodological challenges of identifying a group whose only common factor appears to be that they exist to ruin survey data will be considerable, and call for careful planning. The larger philosophical question of who counts and who decides, lies beyond the scope of this inquiry and must be encountered in the wider world.
End