^ That first one in particular is gorgeous! Especially since River 3 is one of my favourite buildings from the last boom.
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Originally Posted by someone123
There is really nothing wrong with the stats and the data can be interesting and beautifully presented (e.g., in a map). I do think it has narrow applicability, like it might tell you how much farmland otherwise might have been gobbled up by an alternate development style. Often the data quality is not there but people think numbers imply sound reasoning. The correlation with urbanism is maybe 0.2, not 0.9. At very high densities (Hong Kong) it gets interesting too but we mostly don't have this in Canada.
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That's a huge problem when it comes to density. Not only because density stats can be so easily skewed based on what land is and isn't included, but as you say, it can take so many different forms. It's less of an issue when talking about specific development types, but even then, a category like "apartment buildings of fewer than 5 floors" can still take different forms. Like they can be surrounded by large lawns or packed together and right to the street in like town houses. Or they can be 2 stories or 4 stories which is a 100% difference in density. So you'd need to combine different stats, and people will bicker on which ones to use,
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Originally Posted by someone123
It's a wider phenomenon in society with social media factoids or very superficial Wikipedia or AI-generated content that sits atop a scientistic neoliberal culture where people disregard human experience unless numbers are attached. The YIMBY movement suffers from this. It's not all bad, but it's got core flaws in its values.
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That reminds me of the McNamara fallacy. I don't know if it's a disregard of human experience as much as it is a desire for verifiability. I think we view experiential testimony as being suspect since people can have biases or even be intentionally deceptive so we want independent confirmation. Which probably comes from how it's drilled into our heads in academia that if you can't cite a reputable external source for a claim, then it doesn't count.
Which does have a sound logical basis in that if someone's reaction to something - such as preferring one city's built environment over another's - is based on something solely within that person, then it isn't very relevant to other people who didn't have that reaction. But if it's based on relevant differences between the cities, then that has implications for other people since they could also be affected. For instance, if a person felt safe walking through one city and felt frightened walking through another, one possibility is that there is some difference in the danger levels of the two cities in which case there should be some way to measure that difference. Or if there isn't any meaningful difference between the two and the person just heard more fear mongering in the media about one than the other, it should be possible to reveal that with stats. But to your point, the "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that there are some things (maybe not so much the danger example) that can affect human experience that are difficult or even impossible to measure.
For me, the challenge really comes down to determining which type of situation it is. The McNamara fallacy is kind of like other similar fallacies such as the sunk cost fallacy in that the type of reasoning in question is really only fallacious when applied incorrectly. With the McNamara fallacy, it really depends whether the thing the person cares about can realistically be measured, if not directly, at least via proxies that offer a good approximation. And that comes down to whether the person is making a claim about the external world or a claim about their feelings about it or perceptions of it. Which is hard because the two things are often closely interwoven.
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