These dice — billed as a “Pair of erotic dice in Ivory, Germany, early 18th century” — coincide pretty neatly with the, let’s say, birth of statistics. And not just chronologically: setting aside that field’s ambitious truth claims, feeble efforts to historicize itself (but not too much because contingency), and its basically occult pretensions, these dice also neatly, let’s say, embody the field’s patriarchal approach the world. If anything, stats and patriarchy became deeply intertwingled over the last few centuries that a lot of what we now identify as patriarchy might be better understood primarily as stats, rather than vice versa.
If you’re in the market for some historically oriented critiques of statistics — all excellent in very different ways — in chronological order of publication, with links to Glenn Fleishman’s super isbn.nu (because relying on Amazon as the default bibliographical authority is just appalling):
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Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (1990)
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O’Neil, Cathy, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2017)
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Mau, Steffen, The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social (2019)
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Joque, Justin, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism (2022)
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Shepherd, Mark: There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life (2022)
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D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (2023)
And it’s never a bad time to quote Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “die” in the Devil’s Dictionary:
DIE, n. The singular of “dice.” We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, “Never say die.” At long intervals, however, some one says: “The die is cast,” which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:
A cube of cheese no larger than a die May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.