By actual experience in working and managing in many activities I can state flatly that the most dangerous worker-manager thing to do is to work or manage from something else than statistics.

Interpersonal relations with many strata of many societies in many lands with many activities demonstrates plainly that Man’s largest and most unjust fault consists wholly of acting on opinion.

Opinions can be as varied as the weather in Washington, all on the same subject. When one says “opinion” one is dealing with that morass of false reports and prejudices which make up the chaos of current social orders.

Some seek an answer in status. “If one has STATUS one is safe” is about as frail as a house of cards. Ask some recently deposed dictator or yesterday’s idol what his status was worth. Yet many work exclusively for status. In Spain it is enough to have an executive degree. One doesn’t have to do any executiving. Work at it? Caramba no!

In capitalisms it is enough to be an heir and in communisms it is only necessary to be the son of a commissar. Work? Nyet.

Revolts are protests against idle status. Where are the kings of yesteryear?

Riding along on the last generation’s statistics is as fatal as a diet of thin air.

Undeserved status is a false statistic. Nothing is more bitterly resented, unless it is a statistic earned without status by those who live by status alone!

William Stieber, the most skilled intelligence chief of the 19th century, who won the Franco-Prussian war for Bismarck, was hated by German officers because he was not a proper officer but a civilian!

When German officers took over German intelligence they lost two wars in a row and the caste is very unlamentedly dead.

So long as “character” can be reviled, so long as “opinion” is used, so long as governments run on rumors and false reports, the social scene will continue to be a mess.

You will not believe it but governments think newspaper stories are “public opinion.” One US President was astounded to be given a wildly enthusiastic public reception at an airport. The press had been hammering him for a year and the poor fellow thought it was “public opinion.” Texts on public relations remark this strange governmental fixation on believing the press.

That means all a nation’s enemies have to do is bribe or hire some underpaid reporters or semibankrupt publishers, and voila! it can steer the government any way it wishes!

Do a survey on any personality or subject and the conflicts in opinion are revealed as fantastic.

Seven witnesses to one street accident will even give seven conflicting accounts.

Thus this whole field of “opinion” and “reports” is a quicksand endangering both personal repute and management skill.

It is so bad that wars and revolutions stem directly from the use of opinion and the neglect of statistics.

In a chaos it is necessary to set up one point or terminal which is stable before one can really decide anything much less get anything done.

A statistic is such a stable point. One can proceed from it and use it to the degree that it is a correct statistic.

One can detect then, when things start to go wrong well before they crash.

Using opinion or random rumors or reports one can go very wrong indeed. In fact, using these without knowing the statistics one can smash a life or crash a group.

The US Navy operates on the social attainments and civilized behavior of their people.

A naval officer is promoted on the basis of his amiability and the social skill of his wife!

A clerk is promoted because he marries the boss’s daughter.

A governor is elected because he could play a guitar!

This is a whirlwind of chaos because of the falseness of the statistics used.

So the stat used is itself an outpoint in each case.

Outpoints are more than useful in prediction.

The whole reason one does a data analysis and a situation analysis is to predict.

The biggest outpoint would be a missing ideal scene, the next biggest would be a correct statistic for it.

If these are missing then prediction can become a matter of telling fortunes with bamboo sticks.

One predicts in order to continue the viability of an organism, an individual, a group, an organization, a state or nation or planet, or to estimate the future of anything.

The more outpoints the less future.

A disaster could be said to be a totality of outpoints in final and sudden culmination.

This gives one a return to chaos.

The closer one approaches a disaster the more outpoints will turn up. Thus the more outpoints that turn up the closer one is approaching a disaster.

When the outpoints are overwhelming a condition of death is approached.

By being able to predict, the organism or individual or group can correct the outpoints before disaster occurs.

Each sphere of activity has its own prediction.

A group of different activities with a common goal can be predicted by the outpoints turning up in parts of the general activity.

In theory if all parts of a main group or organization had an ideal scene for each, a statistic and an intense interest in maintaining the ideal scene and statistic of each part, the survival would be infinite.

Any group or organism or individual is somewhat interdependent upon its neighbors, on other groups and individuals. It cannot however put them right unless it itself has reached some acceptable level of approach to its ideal scenes.

The conflict amongst organisms, individuals and groups does not necessarily add up to “the survival of the fittest,” whatever that meant. It does however mean that in such conflict the best chance of survival goes to the individual, organism or group that best approaches and maintains its ideal scene, lesser ideal scenes, statistic and lesser statistics.