The Dream of Total Information Became a Nightmare in Postwar China | Aeon Essays

“From the vantage point of today, the travails of China’s statisticians during the 1950s might appear quaint, their obsession with definitional issues and their rejection of probabilistic methods an artifact of a more ideologically driven time. That would be a mistake. The concerns that drove them are with us today, as alive and as urgent as they were 70 years ago. At their heart is a set of basic and timeless questions: what do we need to know and how should we know it?”