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How To Make Numbers Say Anything You Want

17 points by jfornear 17y ago

rmorrison 17y ago
With one false assumption you can prove anything. There are a ton of examples, but here is one of my favorites (from http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html): Bertrand Russell, in a lecture on logic, mentioned that in the sense of material implication, a false proposition implies any proposition. A student raised his hand and said "In that case, given that 1 = 0, prove that you are the Pope". Russell immediately replied, "Add 1 to both sides of the equation: then we have 2 = 1. The set containing just me and the Pope has 2 members. But 2 = 1, so it has only 1 member; therefore, I am the Pope."
cj 17y ago
Let’s make the Democrats blue dark and bold, give it a bit of an angry feel to it. This is our way of getting the audience to look at the democrats in a harsh way. Since when is blue a "harsh" color? If they were trying to give democrats an angry feel, dems should have been red. And what the hell is wrong with increasing the interval of the x-axis to make it more readable? I think this article is more deceptive than the graphs are.
- tbgvi 17y ago
  I think what he's describing in the article is more of an art than a science. Also the standard color for democrats is blue (blue state, etc..) so making their part of the chart red wouldn't make sense when comparing them to republicans (traditionally red)
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
As far as articles on statistical quackery goes this one is as close to content free as I've seen. You can do better HN.
- jfornear 17y ago
  You didn't think it was interesting how he made his graph? This guy is pretty smart even if his style doesn't fit in with things we're used to seeing on HN. His quick break down of the recovery chart was more informative than any HN comments were when this issue came up last month. I rarely submit anything anyway though, so I wouldn't worry about it if you disagree.

17 points by jfornear 17y ago

With one false assumption you can prove anything. There are a ton of examples, but here is one of my favorites (from http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html): Bertrand Russell, in a lecture on logic, mentioned that in the sense of material implication, a false proposition implies any proposition. A student raised his hand and said "In that case, given that 1 = 0, prove that you are the Pope". Russell immediately replied, "Add 1 to both sides of the equation: then we have 2 = 1. The set containing just me and the Pope has 2 members. But 2 = 1, so it has only 1 member; therefore, I am the Pope."

cj 17y ago

Let’s make the Democrats blue dark and bold, give it a bit of an angry feel to it. This is our way of getting the audience to look at the democrats in a harsh way. Since when is blue a "harsh" color? If they were trying to give democrats an angry feel, dems should have been red. And what the hell is wrong with increasing the interval of the x-axis to make it more readable? I think this article is more deceptive than the graphs are.

tbgvi 17y ago
I think what he's describing in the article is more of an art than a science. Also the standard color for democrats is blue (blue state, etc..) so making their part of the chart red wouldn't make sense when comparing them to republicans (traditionally red)

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

As far as articles on statistical quackery goes this one is as close to content free as I've seen. You can do better HN.

jfornear 17y ago
You didn't think it was interesting how he made his graph? This guy is pretty smart even if his style doesn't fit in with things we're used to seeing on HN. His quick break down of the recovery chart was more informative than any HN comments were when this issue came up last month. I rarely submit anything anyway though, so I wouldn't worry about it if you disagree.