The idea that someone would advocate that the residents of Lincoln should pay millions of dollars of their money to a construction project on the basis of vague aspirations about “values and beliefs", without a close look at the relevant facts -- including the relevant numbers -- is so mind boggling that words fail me.
Message: 24
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2023 19:04:53 -0400
From: Lis Herbert <
[email protected]>
To: Lynne Smith <
[email protected]>
Cc: Dennis Picker <
[email protected]>, Lincoln
<
[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [LincolnTalk] Community Center- size considerations
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I'm sorry, but the hair-splitting -- 13,000 vs. 11,400 sq. ft. -- so clouds
the discussion that it becomes meaningless, especially when there is a
suggestion to make up that 1,600 sq. ft. with other spaces in town. Aren't
there administrative costs -- time and staffing -- associated with that way
of thinking? What is gained by slimming things down by less than 10%?
I've read through these threads, and the numbers -- oh my god the numbers.
When I listened to a podcast this week from the London Review of Books
related to this piece (which I urge you to read)
<
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/john-lanchester/get-a-rabbit> all
I could think of was the Community Center, and the discussions that go
round and round about the usage, the square footage, the justification (or
not) for those numbers, the need to survey further, the need to start
again, etc. To quote Mr. Lanchester:
Discussions that were once about values and beliefs ? about what a society
wants to see when it looks at itself in the mirror ? have increasingly
turned to arguments about numbers, data, statistics.
And:
As the House of Commons Treasury Committee said dryly in a 2016 report on
the economic debate about EU membership, *?many of these claims sound
factual because they use numbers.?*
The idea that numbers convey credibility is nonsense. We are meant to
believe that some people possess some level of numeracy that the rest of us
can't, and that only they pay keen attention to stats and figures. And yet
these same people really just don't want to see anything built, at all:
some of them voted against the trimmed down, tiered budgets at the vote
last winter, after loudly proclaiming by email (spewing numbers everywhere)
that what we need are trimmed down, tiered budgets to choose from. This is
not arguing in good faith, this is muddying the waters so people feel like
they can't agree to anything.
Outside Donelan's last weekend I heard a woman tell CCBC volunteers "I only
know we're going to be screwed". Really? How can anybody feel good about
convincing people (or trying to convince people) of things that simply
aren't true? And should a decades-long initiative be scuttled because the
numbers are off a little bit, because a few years have gone by and things
have changed, or population has shifted, or or or?? What happens when you
survey people again, and the slow churn of committees and bureaucracy means
that new number is outdated? (Hint: that's the point of the exercise.)
And has anybody bothered to ask how many people don't take advantage of
these programs -- all of them -- because the facilities aren't up to par,
accessible, pleasant, etc.? That is a number worth talking about.
Lis
