

How to Lie With Statistics - mystsain
http://kocha.co/SKauK

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kator
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." \- Mark
Twain (maybe) [1]

The general public thinks statistics is some magical thing that has predictive
powers bestowed upon it by the power of math. Invoking statistics in a
conversation can often shut other people down and get the "point" across
someone is trying to make while making it hard to attack because it's based on
"statistics". Religions tend to operate this way, some amazing central figure
said it thus it's true. I wonder if this is just a side effect of the human
mind that we hope for something that knows the answer so we don't have to
figure it out ourselves or that we can hope there is some sort of order in the
chaos of our lives. Without the hope that there is some order to our observed
chaos perhaps many people fear they have no chance in the world and are like
leaves floating down a river out to the sea. I personally don't mind the
floating down the sea and once in the while I feel like I can at least peddle
to the shore for a quick adventure. But in the end we're all floating on the
river of time and exposed to a massive amount of chaos that just doesn't
really make sense from our vantage point.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statisti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics)

PS: Sorry feeling a bit philosophical this morning…

~~~
danudey
It's easy to look at a graph and draw conclusions, but there are a lot of
examples out there of disingenuous graphs which take some concentration to
discern their issues, and the graphs usually aren't displayed on TV screens
long enough for there to be an issue. As an example, this one from Fox News:

[http://foxnewsgraphs.tumblr.com/day/2012/08/04](http://foxnewsgraphs.tumblr.com/day/2012/08/04)

The graph seems pretty straightforward; government spending as a percentage of
GDP has gone up under Obama from 20% to about 25%, while FDR kept it roughly
the same, hovering around 10%.

The graph, of course, ends at 1938. I'm sure if we extended it for the rest of
FDR's term, we'd see a different picture of government spending, and probably
a more accurate comparison given the huge increase in military spending thanks
to a constant, unending war on whoever is available.

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marmarlade
The article makes a few good, if basic, points. But, dear me, the English is
appalling. Reads like someone let loose a wild babelfish.

That aside, as Winston Churchill said (or rather, as Nazi propaganda claimed
he said even though he never did - which is quite apt in this context), "I
only believe in statistics that I doctored myself."

~~~
zinfandel
> the English is appalling

The reason is that the article is a poor Russian to English translation.
[http://habrahabr.ru/post/217545/](http://habrahabr.ru/post/217545/)

In fact most of the articles on that site are translated from that Russian
community blog without any reference to the original authors, the design and
structure are also copied and in fact that's not the first English clon of
habrahabr.

In fact it's a good thing that someone translates those posts, as habrahabr is
a really big community and sometimes there are articles which provide unique
information that can't be found in English. But at least they should reference
original authors and mark the posts as translation.

~~~
marmarlade
Yeah, I assumed as much but didn't make the time to investigate. Shame to hear
that it's without attribution, and thanks for doing the work to find the
original!

~~~
zinfandel
Unfortunately, I regularly see that kind of articles on HN and reddit. It's
that kind of feeling: "Hmmm. It seems that I've already read that."

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honoredb
I feel compelled to defend the honor of the New York Times here: that
misleading graph attributed to it is from the New York _Post_ , a completely
different (and nowadays much less reputable) paper.

