Statistics only captures the unremarkable and misses singular greatness

Evidence

If the multitude has a more refined and nobler composition, then the law immediately goes to the devil. And way up at the top, where the great minds are, you no longer can make any calculations at all: when, for example, have great artists ever gotten married! You are hopeless, you who want to discover a law in this. Thus, to the extent that there are laws in history, they are worthless, and history itself – that is, everything that has occurred – is worthless. … Nietzsche inveighs against a version of history ‘that takes the great drives of the masses to be what is important and that views all great men merely as their expression, as the bubbles that become visible on the surface of the flood’. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 175

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: what statistical methods structurally cannot see — singularity, the event, the future — applied to modern data-driven social science.