How to Lie With Statistics

by mystsain • 12 years ago

41 9 12 years ago

marmarlade2• 12 years ago

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."

perrocontodo• 12 years ago

Seems to me that my man "KlauS" ran the text through Google Translate. Couldn't finish it.

stackcollision• 12 years ago

To be fair, based on some of the other statements I've seen attributed to Churchill, I wouldn't be surprised if he had actually said that.

zinfandel2• 12 years ago

the English is appalling

The reason is that the article is a poor Russian to English translation. 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.

marmarlade2• 12 years ago

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!

kator• 12 years ago

"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...

PS: Sorry feeling a bit philosophical this morning…

danudey• 12 years ago

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

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.

honoredb• 12 years ago

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.

How to Lie With Statistics

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