
Cambridge professor on how to stop being manipulated by misleading statistics - Osiris30
http://qz.com/643234/cambridge-professor-on-how-to-stop-being-so-easily-manipulated-by-misleading-statistics/
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cisstrd
"We know, for example, that “relative risks” can be used to look impressive."

This is, sadly, extremely true and even more sadly, very often used. 5 times
more likely to die from x, sounds impressive, risk increase from 0.001 to
0.005 percent does not. Newspapers want to ... sell newspapers, and sounding
dramatic is part of it. If every person capable of reading "Bad Science" by
Ben Goldacre did so, this would be a better world. It's by the way the best
I've seen to give the amateur an understanding of statistics, studies, being
critical, manipulation by media, et cetera... (while being entertaining and an
easy read, a frequent present of mine to other people).

"Depends on what you mean by rational. I don’t like that word. You could use
other words like “value-congruent,” which fit in with what people feel is the
appropriate value. Those are the decisions they will make and not regret in
the future."

"Value-congruent", nice one. "Rational" is indeed one of those empty words
that is thrown around.

One thing I also find incredibly important: People have to understand science
is a METHOD, not an AUTHORITY. Because people don't listen to authority, but
in many cases they can't argue much with reason. This is incredibly important,
a lot of the anti-science sentiment stems from viewing science as an
authority, and this is extremely stupid.

~~~
Fomite
It should be noted that there are reasons, both good and bad, for why we use
relative risks:
[http://journals.lww.com/epidem/Pages/articleviewer.aspx?year...](http://journals.lww.com/epidem/Pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2010&issue=01000&article=00002&type=Fulltext)

Also, at this point, relative risk models are _much_ more well developed.
While we'd all love absolute risk measures, if you have to choose between an
absolute measure with known confounding we can't handle with current methods,
or a relative measure that can, the choice is much less clear.

~~~
cisstrd
At the end of the day, as noted in the article, different data has to be
presented in different ways, or actually the same set of data may be presented
in different ways, it depends on what you want to focus on, what exactly is
your subject of interest, et cetera. But, and that's my point, if the entity
responsible is not interested in how to represent data or a certain conclusion
one has made as clearly as possible to the public, but to sell newspapers and
get clicks[1], then what do you expect?

So it is not my intention to disregard any form of presenting/visualizing data
without a specific example or proper context.

[1] It is my personal belief that Social Media, Twitter, and the short
attention span of the modern age all aided extremely in this. If you look at
"sophisticated media outlets" at Facebook, they are playing the click-bait
game nevertheless. How to be on Facebook or Twitter and not be a tabloid?

~~~
Fomite
This was actually more of a general note than one addressing you specifically.
I've seen "Relative measures are wrong and bad and you should feel bad!" enter
what I'll call the "Educated Layperson" lexicon regarding statistics, while
ignoring that there are often very good reasons for why these choices are
made.

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pokoleo
For more reading on the topic, I'd recommend "How to Lie with Statistics"[0].
It's a short read (144 pages), with mainly tongue-in-cheek instructions on how
to mislead.

Most of the usual tricks ('drop the axes', percentage-points, etc) are there,
but there are many other, less obvious tricks.

One of the cooler arguments in the book is that it's easy to lean on someone's
implicit assumption of volume to modify their understanding.

If you inflate a 15% increase in house spending to look larger than it is,
drawing pictures of houses that are 15% wider will make people intuit a 50%[1]
increase, despite reading 15%. The author suggests that even if you're
incredibly clear with the text surrounding the charts, people still use the
charts to understand the scales of change.

[0] [http://amzn.to/1RmCVmL](http://amzn.to/1RmCVmL) (disclaimer: affiliate
link) [1] 1.15^3 ~= 1.5

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nonbel
>"I got very grumpy at an official graph of British teenage pregnancy rates
that apparently showed they had declined to nearly zero. Until I realized that
the bottom part of the axis had been cut off, which made it impossible to
visualize the (very impressive) 50% reduction since 2000."

Don't understand. I'd think _not_ truncating the y-axis would make it more
difficult to see a change.

>"I thought people would know that 3 out of 100 is equal to 3% is equal to
0.03. But they are very different!"

Don't understand. Those numbers are all the same by definition.

~~~
tome
> >"I thought people would know that 3 out of 100 is equal to 3% is equal to
> 0.03. But they are very different!"

> Don't understand. Those numbers are all the same by definition.

They are ways of representing that same number but people respond to them
differently.

~~~
nonbel
So the numbers are not very different, just erroneously perceived to be
different (according to psychologists). I guess it isn't as odd as I thought
after skimming, but I still don't like it.

~~~
golergka
Numbers are not different mathematically. Written representations of numbers
are different psychologically.

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beejiu
There's a fun video he created with Cambridge University a few years ago,
called "Professor Risk". Worth a watch (6 minutes)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4)

Takeaway from the video "I've come to the conclusion that one of the biggest
risks is being too cautious."

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forgetsusername
Another source I can link to when people in comment sections blindly state, "y
axis should start at zero!", which is almost as annoying "correlation isn't
causation". Context.

