[Forum SIS] dss Sapienza-seminar: Walter J. Radermacher Which facts does society actually need?

[giovanna jona lasinio]

The seminar is part of the series of seminar "Stories from the global world
by numbers" that

is centered on official statistics topics at both global and local scales.
The seminars will be aimed at a very general public and students are highly
encouraged to attend.

Walter J. Radermacher

(former EUROSTAT Director - General)

*Which facts does society actually need?*


*Sapienza University, 10. February 2020 Aula I Gini (ground floor)Seminar
series “Stories from the global world by numbers”*

Is data the new gold? In some discussions, you can't help but get the
impression that we are exploring all the technical finesses to access the
valuable commodity and make our best use of it. Whatever is associated with
the term 'data' seems to get some of the glamour out of it. Decisions,
politics, management and much more should now be ‘data-driven’. In a job
interview, it is advantageous to distinguish yourself as a 'data
scientist', whereas it is considered rather boring to use the professional
title 'statistician'. Big data, machine learning, algorithms and artificial
intelligence promise solutions for problems that have so far been handled
without much success. Traditional methods of generating knowledge by
laborious, cost-intensive and time-consuming collecting of data appear
outdated and superfluous in this light.

The growing importance of statistical evidence, data, and information for
political decisions is reflected in the handy and popular formulation 'Data
for Policy' (D4P). However, this label is only suitable to a limited extent
for characterising the network of relationships and mutual influence
between data on the one hand and politics on the other. Even if the amount
of data is growing at an enormous rate in the era of digitalisation and
globalisation, this raw material of data is not directly usable for
politics. Instead, suitable processes are needed to distil, refine and
process the valuable content for politics into digestible information from
the flood of raw data. The term 'facts' is used here as a generic term for
such information. When data is at the beginning of the processing, facts
are at the end.

Three aspects are decisive for the quality of statistical information:
first, statistical measurement quality; second, theoretical-methodological
consistency; and third, relevance for information needs and decisions. Only
if all three aspects are achieved satisfactorily, or better 'adequately',
can a statistical number, indicator, graph or map play its role: Because
then it is fit for purpose.
-- 
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Giovanna Jona Lasinio
Professor Environmental Statistics
Department of Statistical Sciences
"Sapienza" University of Rome
P.le Aldo Moro 5
00185 Rome Italy
tel (+39)0649910473
skype: gjona
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