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This is a blog to communicate various discussions and views that happen in the department around the topic of sustainability. It is written from the point of view of the Green Champion.
31st March 2025
Last week we had another Sustainability Pizza Lunch in the Statistical Science staff common room, which was mostly attended by our PhD students. The topic chosen for discussion was submitted by Teresa Lee:
"Do you think statisticians have a responsibility to social, political and other public discourses, whether it is through statistical applications, public engagement or discussions with other statisticians? Why, why not, and to what extent?"
We can relate the above to sustainability as an example of something we can all reasonably agree is necessary to work on so even though it is political, it's also about saving everything on the planet from catastrophe. Surely if we must be responsible, sustainability is the easiest thing to justify. I wonder about widening out this responsibility to areas connected to sustainability, or perhaps even unrelated. Is it the same, or is it different? With the incredibly political history of the subject itself and its development connected to eugenics, I think about how people at that time really did think they were being responsible even though that turned out very badly!
The discussion in the group at the pizza lunch moved through the following ideas:
Communication of statistics always has political weight. Different audiences have different communication presented to them. People remember different things. Statisticians may have a bias about their audience, and will be thinking about how they want people to hear the data, which is a clear subjectivity. The audience carries emotional responses to prior knowledge. Statisticians condensing thoughts changes the message and takes away broader uncertainty. There is much under the surface. To improve communication of statistics, it is necessary to try to keep uncertainty in any condensed messages.
A statistician should ideally state that they don’t know everything "but here is what I can see. Here is my expertise."
Is statistics an art?
Do you carry out statistics for statistics' sake or do you do statistics for a social purpose? The group said it’s the second. It was agreed no point otherwise. Statistics is not the same as mathematics which can be done without a connection to anything else. Statistics is an application to other things.
Can statisticians be philosophers of their subject or should there be a specialism of the philosophy of statistics done by people who aren’t statisticians? And this was the point at which we stopped eating pizza and went our separate ways...
What do I think, as Statistical Science Green Champion and the person who instigates these discussions? I am interested in the emotional response of the audience based on their prior knowledge, I would think this is something to consider (and possibly focus on depending on context) when communicating statistical information to audiences where you have a strong social purpose to your work, e.g. you’re trying to persuade people of the merits of living differently for sustainability reasons.
Continuing with emotions, I have recently been considering whether statistics researchers often feel emotion about their research. When I look at historical examples of eugenics research I have an emotional response, which I found helped me to find items relating to it by getting a feel for the type of material related to it, without being a qualified expert - I am an "interested layperson" who has worked with this topic after stumbling upon it by accident in 2019. Did the researchers who worked with eugenics in the early 20th century feel emotion about what they were doing? Perhaps they did, and maybe that’s what I can feel when I look at it. Only, it’s a jarring, ear ringing recognition of people creating work they were very proud of and thought would save humanity. Reading their thoughts now feels uncanny, bizarre, yet strangely familiar. By the accepted standards of the present day, the eugenicists' research has blatant flaws (and extreme examples of personal data being misused) which can be picked up on by our students in the Statistical Science department who have been investigating this history as an extra-curricular project.
21st November 2024
Yesterday we had a Sustainability Pizza Lunch in the staff common room. This was well attended and we had a very lively discussion on a topic which was chosen by one of our PhD students, Teresa Lee:
"How climate change has impacted our mental health in day-to-day life (whether it is through the idea of climate or air pollution), and explore how we can apply our skillsets in STEM to solve these problems?"
As a group, we discussed the ways that people can feel powerless to do anything about climate change, especially when their campaigning is met with hostility, and even imprisonment. We talked about individual responsibility vs collective/governmental management of sustainability, and how mental health might be improved if governments took more responsibility and the burden of solving issues as opposed to leaving it up to a few dedicated individuals to take on more than is humanly possible, and relying on populations to manage their own lives to revolve around lower emissions when this is not realistic given that the population as a whole has many different priorities and climate change can feature quite low on that. There was a mention of the problem of poverty in relation to sustainable choices, and that the harsh economic reality of life can have a negative effect on people's ability to choose the sustainable option. The answer to this is perhaps more collectivisation in living arrangements to enable energy sharing and efficiency. We considered the possibility of empowerment of climate activists, and how this could be achieved. It was felt that the present situation was very disempowering and that climate activists are given harsher punishments for their actions than people who hurt people. My own view on this is that we need to shift mindsets to change the hierarchical structure of power relations on this topic. Climate activists are often on the ground, in a prone or supine position, with authority towering over in a violent way. Instead, I think climate activists should be elevated and taken seriously. This can start with climate activists realising their own inherent power which we all possess, and harnessing that in a certain way to achieve results in ways that effectively interact with the structures they have identified as problematic. It was also discussed that the people who are continuing to allow the climate degradation and pollution for their financial gain could be considered murderers of future generations. We talked about the ways that business incentives need to shift in order to reward sustainable practices to flourish, and how this would likely require an economic shift in favour of climate points having a higher value than the current status quo. Lawsuits for deaths from pollution was mentioned as a monetary way of identifying responsible organisations and therefore ensuring change occurs.
Written by Stephanie Jane Dickinson.
