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Chapter 16¹⁶
Epilogue

Over the past six years, our network of scholars has engaged in an on-going conversation that we have come to recognize as being centered on unseen forces that shape, and are shaped by, the social nature of human beings. The essays that make up this volume give a hint as to what our conversation has been like, but the linear structure that a book imposes cannot fully evoke the give and take of vigorous debate, the excitement of viewing an old problem from a new perspective, or the satisfaction that comes from sharing the search for knowledge – even when we did not agree on the interpretation of what we discovered in our search.

We deliberately chose to describe our membership as a network rather than a committee, or seminar, or task force, or club, or salon. A network is defined as much by the connections between people as it is by the individual people themselves. Networks can be described pictorially as nodes (points that represent individuals), some of which are connected by edges (lines that represent links between two individuals). In our network, we have focused on the value of the edges, and have held the conviction that much is to be gained by exploring previously untested connections. We started with a set of nodes having only a handful of edges, and we ended with many more edges than nodes.

As a result, our network – and each individual in the network – has been enriched as we have learned more about, and more from, perspectives that initially were unfamiliar to each of us, the end result being that our whole is decidedly greater than the sum of our parts. This illustrates a recurrent theme in the book, that of emergent phenomena—characteristics that can be ascribed to entities at a higher level of organization that, without conscious

[Footnote Text]
16 The lead author is Ronald Thisted, Ph.D., a Professor in the Departments of Health Studies, Statistics, and Anesthesia & Critical Care at the University of Chicago, where he currently chairs the Department of Health Studies. Trained in philosophy and mathematics at Pomona College and in statistics at Stanford University, his interests include the nature of argument and evidence, particularly in the context of health, disease, and medical treatment. He has published articles on topics ranging from treatment for back pain to computational mathematics, and from social determinants of health to the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.
The question of how we come to know—or to claim that we know—things, is left unexamined all too often. The similarities and differences in modes of argument across disciplines, and the variations in what counts for evidence supporting or refuting a position within and across disciplines can be illuminating. Statistics, and statistical argument, provide a rich framework for thinking about such issues as measurement, learning, uncertainty, variation, and experiment. Statistical principles provide a framework for disciplined investigation, for communication about the extent of and limitations to the information at hand, and for combining information from different sources. Although there is enormous variability between individuals, there are also commonalities to their experience that transcend their differences. As a species and as individuals, we rely on these common threads, even when they are invisible to us.

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