Non-profit Nerds Unite!

I'm killing time this Monday afternoon at the Bridge Fund office in southern Chengdu.

I enjoy the small staff here, though my boss Sherub and the program director Kabsung are both out sick at the moment. Everyone is Tibetan, and most of the project managers (grunts) are graduates of English Training Programs similar to the one for which I teach. They're good natured, and while living in a big Chinese city like Chengdu must sometimes suck for a kid who grew up on a grassland, I can tell they enjoy and believe in their work.

While in Kathmandu Mike lent me Wealth of the Poor, the World Resources Council official publication for the year 2005. The work essentially argues that the current and potential financial situation of the world's poorest is vastly underestimated by international bodies and local governments. Most of the world's indigenous poor make their livelihoods from the environment and not from wages or remittances. The purpose is not to say that these people are richer than we think, it's to argue that their environmental situation is crucial to lifting them out of poverty. Too often governments make commitments to alleviate poverty but do not address environmental sustainability or stewardship, which is often the lynchpin of survival.

The extent of the publication's statistics and case studies is what struck me as truly laudable. It was also very oriented towards giving power to the people.

Here in the office, I've picked up a copy of Methods in Development Research: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. It has a number of case studies with an emphasis on asking the right questions and using the right data to assess development projects. I've also got my eye on a fat volume called Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, but it seems a bit daunting at the moment.

I didn't take behavioral statistics until the second semester of my junior year at Rice, because I didn't add my Psychology major until I returned from China. That course basically changed the entire way that I view human epistimology. In psychology, the proper way to analyze basic statistical hypotheses is to compare the measured difference between two conditions against a random difference between the conditions (null-hypothesis). If the experimental results diverge from a model of randomness by more than five percent, the data are said to be "statistically significant."

Essentially it is a method of finding a measurable signal amidst random noise. Our brains work in a similar manner: in order for a cognitive event to be salient (perceptible), the significance of the signal must break a threshhold to be noticed among the noise of random neuron firing.

Statistics allows soft sciences like psychology and economics to actually discuss reality quantitatively. It allows an experiment about the way that people behave to be subject to factor analysis. It moves the psychologist away from the armchair and into the laboratory. I've abandoned psychology as an option for graduate school, but I am hoping that I will be able to continue to study statistics in whatever I choose to do later on.

I've renewed my interest in NGO work, and books like these give me hope that I'll be able to link my willingness to work in the development sphere with my secret desire to parse vast swaths of numbers into something statistically significant. In this Zen Kantian world, where no thing exists as "a thing in itself," I feel it is the only way to make a statement of fact beyond mere speculation.

If only there were a way to evaluate the hearts of men.

I'd most like to find a way to do this work closer to home. My fantasy is to find a field with as much relevance to the Tibetan Plateau as to the new New Orleans.