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One of the most important life lessons I've learned as an adult is how easy (and common) it is to mislead people without actually lying to them.
by ThinkingGuy 8y ago
One of the most important life lessons I've learned as an adult is how easy (and common) it is to mislead people without actually lying to them.
- kemiller2002 8y agoI took statistics in high school, and the first day the teacher gets up and says, "Let me show you how statistics lie." He gave example after example about how the graphs and data presented were not wrong, but they were definitely meant to bias you into thinking something else. I remember one story in particular, and this is totally anecdotal, but I think it makes a good point. During the cold war, supposedly, there was a foot race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The story goes that the U.S. athlete won the race. The Russian newspapers published, "U.S.S.R. takes second place. U.S. athlete finishes next to last." I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes a good point.
- mcguire 8y agoOnce upon a time, I was in a seminar discussing performance papers and pointed out that plotting exponential data points (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x...) on a linear graph was misleading. A professor asked, "what's wrong with that?" The right half of the graph had 3 data points, making it almost a straight line.