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Not sure statistics ever "accurately" represented the world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L

Not sure statistics ever "accurately" represented the world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...

HillaryBriss 10y ago
Yeah. The article makes a case that people have come to a newfound mistrust for statistics. But, that mistrust has been around for a very long time. A big part of the mistrust is not in the numbers themselves, but in the people who trot out the statistics and the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers Sometimes not so carefully. In a previous election, I remember seeing a purported screenshot from an evening news show that showed poll results, but skipped the #2 candidate entirely. Presumably they favored #1, and didn't want people to think there was a viable contender. This screenshot itself could have been faked, but we've seen other serious blunders by TV news, like the fabricated names of officers on a downed flight.
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    A recent example I saw was a friend of mine on Facebook, who posted a snapshot from an MSNBC program. It was an attack on Rex Tillerson, in the form of a bar graph of profit potential for ExxonMobil by country. The countries seemed pretty random (that well known oil giant Germany was in there) but at the top was Russia with a bar far far larger than any other country on the chart. The graph was an obvious attempt to continue the theme of "Trump administration is owned by Russia". The problem was that the numbers next to each bar weren't labelled: the graph was totally lacking in context. I did some googling and found that the graph appeared to be measuring profit potential in millions of acres of drilling rights. Thus it was comparing an acre of frozen Arctic ocean with an acre of Germany as if they were the same thing. There are industry standard ways to compare oil fields. I've never once seen oil fields measured in this way because it ignores extraction costs, but sure, if you want to imply that Russia will be wildly more profitable than anywhere else on earth then that's one way to do it. But it's an abuse of statistics. I pointed this out to the friend in question who simply said that she had a policy of not taking part in political debates on Facebook.

Not sure statistics ever "accurately" represented the world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_stati...

HillaryBriss 10y ago

Yeah. The article makes a case that people have come to a newfound mistrust for statistics. But, that mistrust has been around for a very long time. A big part of the mistrust is not in the numbers themselves, but in the people who trot out the statistics and the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers.

nitrogen 10y ago
the way they carefully cherry pick numbers that support their cause, ignoring other numbers Sometimes not so carefully. In a previous election, I remember seeing a purported screenshot from an evening news show that showed poll results, but skipped the #2 candidate entirely. Presumably they favored #1, and didn't want people to think there was a viable contender. This screenshot itself could have been faked, but we've seen other serious blunders by TV news, like the fabricated names of officers on a downed flight.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  A recent example I saw was a friend of mine on Facebook, who posted a snapshot from an MSNBC program. It was an attack on Rex Tillerson, in the form of a bar graph of profit potential for ExxonMobil by country. The countries seemed pretty random (that well known oil giant Germany was in there) but at the top was Russia with a bar far far larger than any other country on the chart. The graph was an obvious attempt to continue the theme of "Trump administration is owned by Russia". The problem was that the numbers next to each bar weren't labelled: the graph was totally lacking in context. I did some googling and found that the graph appeared to be measuring profit potential in millions of acres of drilling rights. Thus it was comparing an acre of frozen Arctic ocean with an acre of Germany as if they were the same thing. There are industry standard ways to compare oil fields. I've never once seen oil fields measured in this way because it ignores extraction costs, but sure, if you want to imply that Russia will be wildly more profitable than anywhere else on earth then that's one way to do it. But it's an abuse of statistics. I pointed this out to the friend in question who simply said that she had a policy of not taking part in political debates on Facebook.