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Never trust statistics. I once worked on a reservation system for some pretty big ski resorts. We were running late, working nights, and one of the last thing

by codr7 1y ago

Never trust statistics. I once worked on a reservation system for some pretty big ski resorts. We were running late, working nights, and one of the last things we had to finish was the official statistics reports about number of guest nights etc that gets published by the government. Lets just say that the statistics that year had little to do with reality.

deleted 1y ago
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amw-zero 1y ago
You’re confusing statistics with forecasting. We can and should trust statistics. We should just never trust their relation to future behavior.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Fairly sure the previous poster is describing statistics that were made up, rather than measured/sampled. Those are, for hopefully obvious reasons, not very trustworthy
  - stefs 1y ago
    so, the actual lesson to be learned was more along the lines of "never trust lies".
    - codr7 1y ago
      Sure, but in this case the lies ended up packaged as the official tourism statistics report from the government, and I'm pretty sure it was neither the first nor last time that happened.
- Scrutiny6707 1y ago
  >We can and should trust statistics. We should just never trust their relation to future behavior. 99% of people I've ever met believe statistics and forecasting are synonyms. Mostly because it gets used that way in a political sense.