Herr Doktor Professor President Barack Obama clarifying how “the long arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice” is really just a best-fitted line based on statistical inference. “Please note that although it may look as if some data points don’t at all fit the inferred trend, the ‘arc of history’ does not bend on its own,” he asserted. “Legal scientists assure us that we can rigorously identify certain points as ‘statistical outliers.’ “No matter how imperfect…” he paused for effect, “excluding those outliers by such scientifically and legally valid means vastly increases our confidence in the fit of Dr. King’s famous function.”
Said one brimming undergraduate after the heady lecture, “I’m like so aspiring. It’s amazing how he can so totally account for 99% of the variance in all of human history based on the principle of enlightened self-interest and some statistical thing-a-ma-jig. The legal science of humanity is just plain poetry. It gives me a thrill up the leg.”
No matter how imperfect….