{"id":35590,"date":"2024-02-07T12:54:34","date_gmt":"2024-02-07T20:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=35590"},"modified":"2024-02-07T12:54:34","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T20:54:34","slug":"blinded-by-experiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/blinded-by-experiences\/","title":{"rendered":"Blinded by Experiences?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first started reading Tim Harford\u2019s book How to Make the World Add Up<\/em>, I thought, ah, this read will be a breeze. I agree with Harford\u2019s premise that statistics can give us valuable information. At first glance, his ten rules for thinking about statistics seemed straightforward and easy.\u00a0 Early in my career, I was invited to participate in a Community Coaches training program.\u00a0 Juan Sepulveda, a top consultant was flown in monthly to spend the day teaching us to be the best nonprofit execs for our own organizations and coaches to other organizations. All aspects of nonprofit workings from mission, vision and core value statements to governance, fundraising, power and service were included[1]<\/a>. The course gave structure to what I was doing. One assignment that stood out was to spend at least one full week listening or reading to news from a different perspective.\u00a0 If someone typically listened to NPR then turn on a station that was historically known to be more conservative, and vice versa.\u00a0 While the exercise did not change my way of voting, it did make me more understanding of different political approaches. Whether in work or personal life, I think of myself as a rational and thoughtful person.\u00a0 I like to see different points of view and learn from other people.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2020. COVID-19 turned into a global pandemic that brought families, cities, and countries to a halt.\u00a0 In my work world, it put us into high gear.<\/p>\n

For the last twenty-four years I have been leading an organization that cares for people living with developmental differences. This means the people we serve have a developmental disability such as down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, or spina bifida, often mixed with psychiatric diagnoses and seizure disorders.<\/p>\n

One of our primary services includes residential group homes. Over half of our residents had no family and others had aging parents or inaccessible family homes.\u00a0 This meant that we continued to have staff around the clock at each of our 6 homes. According to JAMA, Network Open, people living with developmental disabilities have a greater risk of poor outcomes if they contracted COVID-19[2]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before remedies, masks, and \u00a0vaccinations were easily available, nearly every decision we made felt like life and death. There were, also, behavioral issues to navigate when someone just did not have the capacity to understand why we could not go to the mall or visit friends no matter how hard our staff tried to redirect to an activity in the home.<\/p>\n

There were sweet moments during the pandemic. Some of our individuals needed total care and round-the-clock nursing. During the pandemic we had to beg and barter with nurses to work shifts. The difficulty was that in one home, without a nurse, we could not give medications or even feed people without one. One time, a nursing instructor from a local university volunteered to work an overnight shift. We were not beyond accepting any help we could get.<\/p>\n

By the time the world reopened, our staff had worked courageously and those who needed hospitalization survived. Our one casualty was closing our medical group home. The nursing crisis wasn\u2019t going away quickly and sometimes the best way to love someone is to let them go into the hands of another, something I had been telling parents for many years. This time there was a real sting to these words.<\/p>\n

During the pandemic, we watched statistics often. Our local health department regulated our comings and goings based on them. When political figures started dismissing the severity of the pandemic and the value of vaccines and a senior government official reprimanded middle school students for wearing masks, I got angry. Those tools were important for us.<\/p>\n

In How To Make the World Add Up<\/em>, Tim Harford talks about the importance of \u201cgood\u201d statistics that help those using them to see something clearly.[3]<\/a> \u00a0To do that, he recommended that the reader of stats follow some basic rules.<\/p>\n

Reading these rules gave me time to look back over my experiences with the pandemic and put perspective on my frustration with anti-vaccination media and illness dismissiveness. I see that my feelings of fear that wrong decisions could impact someone\u2019s life and the experiences of a year of intensity influenced how I look at the pandemic and statistics around it. Employees lost family members. There were times when sick supervisors would still go to work because there would be no one else available. It was real.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on our reading, I see a connection to The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking. <\/em>The criteria for evaluating reasoning[4]<\/a> do not seem fundamentally different than the rules Harford recommends for statistics.\u00a0 The steps may measure different things, but both have similar concepts.\u00a0 Look at the information carefully.\u00a0 Ask questions.\u00a0 Check your preconceived ideas and assumptions. Was anything omitted? I do not know if the specific questions are as critical as being curious, aware, and open to information that may be different than our own.\u00a0 So now I wonder how this will change me.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, recognizing the possibility of misleading definitions that Darrell Huff espoused[5]<\/a> or the way the tobacco industry flooded the market with doubt and skepticism[6]<\/a>, will help me examine statistics differently. \u00a0\u00a0I still like statistics and recognize their importance.\u00a0 Yet there are times when my own experiences may get in the way of being open to statistics that do not favor my preconceived opinions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Juan Sepulveda, Lead Instructor, Jacksonville Youth Development Community Coaches, 2005.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Landes SD, Turk MA, Damiani MR, Proctor P, Baier S. Rick Factors Associated With COVID-19 Outcomes Among People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Receiving Residential Services. JAMA Network Open<\/em>. 2021:4(6):e2112862.doi:10.1001\/jamanetworkopen.2021.12862.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up (Great Britain: Bridge Street Press, 2021), 11.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide To CRITICAL THINKING: Concepts and Tools<\/em> (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2020), 30.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Harford, 78.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Harford, 14-15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first started reading Tim Harford\u2019s book How to Make the World Add Up, I thought, ah, this read will be a breeze. I agree with Harford\u2019s premise that statistics can give us valuable information. At first glance, his ten rules for thinking about statistics seemed straightforward and easy.\u00a0 Early in my career, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3035],"class_list":["post-35590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-harford-dlgp03","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35591,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35590\/revisions\/35591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}