Christopher Philips
Associate Professor | Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, UNITED STATES
Christopher Phillips' research focuses on the history of science, particularly statistics and mathematics.
Biography
An historian of science and of twentieth-century America, Christopher Phillips' research focuses on the history of science, particularly statistics and mathematics. He has examined the rise and fall of the controversial "new math" curriculum against the changing politics of mid-century America and showed that far from being insulated from politics, the teaching of mathematics was framed as, and understood as, a fundamentally political enterprise. He has looked at the collection of data in professional baseball as a way of exploring the supposed distinction between objective, numbered knowledge and subjective, people knowledge. Phillips is currently working on a history of statistics in medicine.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Historical Studies
Research, Science and Technology Policy
Applied Statistics
Mathematics and Numeracy Curriculum and Pedagogy
History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
Media Appearances (4)
Drinks With The Deal: Author Christopher Phillips
The Deal online
2021-03-31
Christopher Phillips takes Lewis’ opposition between scouts and statheads as the starting point for his book “Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball,” which the Carnegie Mellon University history professor discussed on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast. Like Lewis, Phillips used baseball as a way of examining how organizations create and use data.
If baseball is any indication, the big data revolution is over | Opinion
The Washington Post online
2019-07-09
The big data revolution may soon be over. Companies and governments will still continue to collect data, of course, and computing power will continue to grow. But vastly larger sets of data, even if collected more quickly and effectively, won’t answer all our questions or solve our problems as they …
What Market Research Can Learn from Baseball
Scientific American online
2015-12-03
I thought about this question as I read a new book by Christopher J. Phillips entitled Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball (Princeton University Press, 2019). Phillips, an assistant professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, distinguishes between scorers, who calculate things such as WAR (wins above replacement), and scouts, who observe attributes such as athleticism and determine if a player “has what it takes.”
Opinion | The Politics of Math Education
The New York Times online
2015-12-03
American children have been bad at math for well over a century now. As early as 1895, educational reformers lamented Americans’ “meager results” in the subject. Over the years, critics of math education in this country have cycled through a set of familiar culprits, blaming inadequate teacher training, lackluster student motivation and faulty curricular design. Today’s debates over the Common Core mathematical standards are just the latest iteration of this dispute. Although these issues are important — no reform can ever succeed without considering teacher training and textbook design — resolving them will never make the underlying question of how to teach math “go away.”
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Industry Expertise (1)
Education/Learning
Education (3)
Harvard University: Ph.D., History of Science 2011
Harvard College:: A.B., History and Science
University of Cambridge: M.Phil., History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine
Links (4)
Articles (3)
Precision Medicine and Its Imprecise History
Harvard Data Science Review2020 The origins of precision medicine are not precisely known. That’s due in no small part to ongoing confusion about what precision medicine is. Confusion over the boundaries of a new scientific paradigm shouldn’t surprise anyone, but even the basic terminology isn’t clear in this case. What’s the relationship of precision medicine to personalized medicine? What distinction, if any, is being made with evidence-based medicine? Haven’t clinicians always striven to provide precise recommendations? As a systematic survey recently concluded, whether called precision medicine or personalized medicine, the phrase has come to refer to the way personal data and biomarkers—particularly genetic biomarkers—might be used to tailor treatments for individual patients (Schleidgen, Klingler, Bertram, Rogowski, & Marckmann, 2013). Nothing in this definition signals what’s new about precision medicine, however—genetic information and other patient data have long been used to advance medical research and improve treatments. Only by delving deeper into what precision medicine has meant over time might we understand what’s actually new about the age-old attempt to move from individual and seemingly idiosyncratic patient outcomes to generalizable knowledge about health and disease, and the crucial role statisticians have historically played in that process.
The taste machine: Sense, subjectivity, and statistics in the California wine world
Social Studies of Science2016 This article is about mid-20th-century attempts to turn subjective judgments about the quality and composition of wine into objective knowledge. It focuses on the research of Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis, and his project to formalize the procedures of sensory evaluation. Using controlled experimental conditions, Amerine and colleagues transcribed judgments about taste into numbers that could then be aggregated and analyzed statistically. Through such techniques, they claimed to be able to turn subjectivities into objectivities, rendering private taste sensations into reliable and stable facts about objects in the world.
An Officer and a Scholar: Nineteenth-Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard
History of Education Quarterly2015 Over two centuries after the invention of blackboards, they still feature prominently in many American classrooms. The blackboard has outlasted most other educational innovations and technologies, and has always been more than an aide memoire. Students and teachers have long assumed inscriptions on its surface made mental processes visible. As early as 1880, in fact, the A.H. Andrews & Co. catalog described the blackboard as a “mirror reflecting the workings, character, and quality of the individual mind.” The blackboard's ultimate origins are unclear but in North America one institution, the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, played a particularly important role in establishing the device within classrooms. The blackboard's use at West Point in the first years of the nineteenth century garnered the novel tool notice and by the Civil War, the blackboard's place had been so firmly established in American schools as to be easily overlooked in importance; it was simply part of the physical and intellectual architecture of the classroom, Subsequent changes in construction and production have affected cost and appearance, but the basic idea of a vertical surface on which erasable inscriptions are made has remained.
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