Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"If enough data is collected, a board of inquiry can prove anything."''
|'''Murphy's Law of Combat #75'''}}
This well-known saying is part of a phrase attributed to [[Benjamin Disraeli]] and popularized in the U.S. by [[Mark Twain]]:
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Also be aware of the Law of Very Large Numbers. Any fraction of a very large number is likely to be a large number, no matter how small the fraction is. It is estimated that 2,135,000 Americans have used cocaine (including crack) in the past month. But that's only 0.7% of the population! So, is this a lot of people, or not?
Then you can get the kind of statistical abuse in which you are careful to define the question to get you answer you want. What is the most popular book in the world? Depends if you mean most copies in existence (''Quotations from Chairman Mao''), most copies ever sold ([[The Bible]]) or fastest selling ever (''[[
Statistics are like studies: who made them and who paid them matters a lot. Want to "prove" that [[Murder Simulators|video games cause violence]]? Get a group of scientists that are already savvy to this and don't mind the lack of ethics. Have them draw from a very small pool of test subjects that are known to display violent behavior. Mental hospitals, prisons, schools for children with behavior disorders, what have you. Do some generic tests that are guaranteed to show up positive, come up with numbers, and presto, instant headline. "Recent test shows 77% of subjects become more violent after playing ''[[Mortal Kombat]]''." Most people won't bother with reading the article the whole way through and will just look at the headline. This works with anything from [[Comics Code|comic books]], and rock to watching ''[[Brokeback Mountain]]'' or voting for specific parties, basically anything.
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** The same for the example above about most vehicular accidents occurring near the home (some say "within 25 miles from your home"). This is because most people do most of their driving near their homes, not that the home or the surrounding area is more dangerous than areas distant from the home.
** At some Reform Judaism synagogues, a popular "joke" to lead into the sermon is, "x% of deaths occur in a hospital, x% of deaths occur in a car, x% of deaths happen in the home...[continues on for a while] while there have been only ''three'' deaths in a synagogue, and no deaths ever reported while studying Torah! Clearly, the safest passion, therefore, is studying Torah."
* One of Bothered About [[Dungeons
** Patricia Pulling, the leader of this organization, once said in an interview that "8% of the Richmond VA-area population is involved with Satanic worship at some level." When asked where that figure came from, she said that she estimated that 4% of the teenagers and 4% of the adults. She then added them together and got the 8%.
** Another time, BADD cited an increase in suicides corresponding with a major Dungeons and Dragons release. Again, however, there's no evidence that's not simply a coincidence, as similar statistics can be used to prove that the release of a [[Britney Spears]] CD caused suicide numbers to jump.
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** This prompted unhelpful responses from the panelists: "What if you're a soldier?" "What if you work in a shoe shop, ''near'' a war?"
** QI is well known for deliberately phrasing questions like this in order to confuse the participants. See also "how many moons does the Earth have"—funny as it was, Cruithne and similar objects are near-Earth asteroids in resonant orbits rather than moons in the usual sense. They've now fessed up to the "many moons" thing as an error.
**The vast majority of war is work and often work no one would consider signing up for if there wasn't a war, like building a road through a malaria infested jungle or flying munitions over the Himalayas.
* The ''Column 8'' column in the ''Sydney Morning Herald'' once referenced a statistical correlation between the difficulty of the sudoku on a given day and the price of petrol.
* When [[Ronald Reagan]]'s Attorney General Edwin Meese wanted "proof" that pornography was evil, he created the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. The commission members were a preselected cohort of anti-pornography campaigners. Not surprisingly, they discovered that statistics "proved" that pornography caused crime. However, the 1970 report of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which was done by honest researchers and was highly praised for accuracy and honesty, discovered that there was "no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults."
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* Many casinos like to advertise their slot machines with lines like "Up To 99% Payout!" to make it sound like the player has a good chance to win. First, "up to" means the payout could be 1% for all you know (although laws usually set a minimum). Secondly, even a 99% payout means that for every $100 you put in the machine, on average, you'll get $99 back, i.e. you still lose. That "99% payout" is also an average that is based on something like one million pulls (plays) on the machine. If you play 100 times in one slot machine, you're not getting a representative sample of that average. These machines work differently in the UK. UK Fun With Prizes are required by law to seek their set hold percentage within a certain number of spins (usually 10,000). To achieve this, they naturally [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|cheat all the time]]. They also can be, and often are, programmed to go on a suck cycle and take in way more money then they need to, in order to save up for a large series of payouts later.
* A common problem encountered is Simpson's Paradox, best demonstrated by example: Suppose Hospitals 1 and 2 are nearby, but 1 is better equipped for treating people with severe injuries, so proportionally more of the people taken there are badly hurt. It does better at treating badly hurt people than hospital 2, and also does better at treating people who are not badly hurt. However, since people who're badly hurt are more likely to die than people who're not badly hurt whether or not they go to hospital 1 or hospital 2, hospital 1 may still have a higher overall death rate.
** Simpson's Paradox is when data shows one trend, but dividing it into categories shows the opposite trend. In the example above, hospital 1 has a higher death rate, but if the patients are split into categories based on severity of injury, it has a lower death rate in each category.▼
▲Simpson's Paradox is when data shows one trend, but dividing it into categories shows the opposite trend. In the example above, hospital 1 has a higher death rate, but if the patients are split into categories based on severity of injury, it has a lower death rate in each category.
** The same goes with good doctors and bad doctors, as told in the book [[Super Freakonomics]]. Good doctors are generally given tougher causes while bad doctors are given easier cases. However, if you look at death rates you see that some doctors have higher death rates, but these are usually the good doctors. Patients with serious cases are more likely to die, so good doctors lose a lot of their patients than, say the doctor who cures hiccups. The lesson is that you can be fairly certain that the doctor you receive at a hospital is competent enough to be assigned to you.
* When Russian Orthodox Church is up to banning some more fun stuff, it likes to self-impose the "voice of the populous" liability backed by the claim that according to surveys "70% of Russians are Orthodox Christians". Then some major religious occasion comes in and the attendance rate inevitably mounts to 2-3%. The surveys about the attendance of regular clerical services and general awareness in Orthodox lore yield similar results.
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{{quote|We did that poll CNN Opinion Research Poll, that said, "You like this health care bill or not like it?" We just assumed, a lot of us, that the people who said they didn't like it didn't like it because it was too much interference, or too much taxes or whatever. But if you take a closer look at people who didn’t like it, about 12% of those people who said they didn’t like it thought it didn't go far enough. They wanted a single payer option, they wanted the so-called public option, they didn’t like not from the right, they didn’t like it because it wasn’t left or liberal enough. That’s how you got 50% of the American people who said, "We don’t like this plan." But only about 40 or 38% were the ones who said it was too much government interference.}}
* A banner ad right here on TV Tropes promotes The [[Church of Happyology]], rhetorically asking, "Why is it the world's fastest growing religion?" Hmmm, maybe because this religion that [[Frivolous Lawsuit|cannot be named for legal reasons]] was founded less than 100 years ago, and most major religions are thousands of years old and likely have grown as much as they ever will? Or because they count ad clicks as memberships.
* In the 2004 US Presidential Election, Dick Cheney and John Edwards stated conflicting numbers regarding the Iraq war's casualties... and both men [https://web.archive.org/web/20100108020551/http://www.factcheck.org/cheney_edwards_mangle_facts.html were partially right]! Skip down to "90% of casualties".
* The [[Australian Football League]] managed to turn an increase in positive drug tests into a decrease in positive drug tests. [http://koberulz.webege.com/Blog/2010/08182010Numbers_Lie.php\]{{Dead link}}
* One statistic used to justify the creation of the Comics Code Authority was that a large percentage of criminals liked to read comic books, ergo, comic books influenced people to become criminals. Nobody pointed out that they were using the wrong statistic - they should have been asking what percentage of regular comic book readers became criminals.
** Asking what percentage of criminals were literate enough to read anything ''but'' comic books wouldn't have hurt, either. Comics, after all, have pictures.
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* When Anthrocon decided to move from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, one blogger who protested the move cited that only a tiny number of people of people would be as likely or more likely to attend Anthrocon if it moved to Pittsburgh. The organizers, however, heeded a different statistic: those that lived so far away that the move made little difference.
* Racial profiling tends to be justified by all manner of statistics taken outside of context. An example commonly used by right-wing commentators: 1 in every 3 black males goes to prison, so black people must be more criminally inclined... Now, by "goes to prison", does that mean currently ''in'' prison, those who ''have'' been in prison, will ''go'' to prison, or some combination of the three? Does that statistic include repeat or first-time offenders? Also, exactly what are most black men imprisoned for? {{spoiler|Nonviolent drug-related charges for most first-time offenders.}}
* [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]] loves to put out press releases trying to make the previous night's viewership of their shows look good. With their big hits, this isn't so bad; winning the timeslot in total viewers or Adults 18-49 (the demographic used to set ad rates, and thus the figure used to determine whether or not a show gets renewed) is definitely something to be pleased about (unless there's a huge skew between total and A18-49 viewership, but that's another matter). No matter how poorly-watched a show is, however, the ABC PR department can find some figure that sounds good but doesn't actually mean the show' doing well. They frequently put up demographics that aren't really indicative of a show's survival (e.g. women 18-34, or the adults 25-54 demo that only some cable channels use for ad rates), give the amount that the show built on its lead-in (usually when the lead-in was a repeat or another low-rated show, or [[Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs|a repeat of another low-rated show]]), or claim the the show had the best performance in its timeslot among ABC shows since X weeks/months/years ago (when you look at the absolute ratings, all it says is that ABC's done even worse in the past; this is rarely used for hit new shows since there are usually better statistics for those).
* The [[Fox News Channel]] flashed a ''[[media:OneNineThree.jpg|pie chart]]'' whose claimed percentages added up to ''193%''. Any grade school student can tell you that pie charts don't work that way! Eyeballing the above pie chart the 63% segment looks larger than the 70% segment.
* Programs on [[Animal Planet]] are fond of citing how Americans spend more money annually on cat or dog food than on baby food. This is depicted as evidence that Americans pamper their pets like babies, but overlooks the fact that pets eat pet food for their entire lives, whereas babies only eat baby food for about a year and a half.
* [http://www.badscience.net/ badscience.net] occasionally shows how statistics get misused. For example, [http://www.badscience.net/2011/10/what-if-academics-were-as-dumb-as-quacks-with-statistics/ here] (on small samples it's quite possible that B isn't significantly different from A ''or'' C, but you can put it as "B isn't different from A, C is different from A, so we see that C is different from B", which is wrong) and [http://www.badscience.net/2011/12/this-guardian-story-is-dodgy-traps-in-data-journalism/ here] (limit the view to one of many multipliers which ''per se'' can't prove anything). Unsurprisingly, the areas with traditional relations to snake oil trade suffer most.
* Scott Alexander's series of articles in Slate Star Codex on internet and media chicanery starts with ''[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-facebook-part-1-of-%E2%88%9E/ Lies, Damned Lies, And Facebook (Part 1 of ∞)]'' - it's a foregone conclusion that however many pages you'll write about this, you'll still cover only an infinitesimal part of the ugly mess.
{{quote|The third and most important catch is that these numbers don’t mean what you think they mean and probably don’t mean anything at all}}
== Other examples ==
=== Anime and Manga ===
* [[The Onion]] does parody this from time to time.▼
* Shizuo in [[Durarara!!]] maintains that the series's troll, Izaya, is behind ''every '''single''' weird thing in the setting.'' Sure, Shizuo can get irrational when mad, and will even use statistics and percents to maintain points. [[Properly Paranoid|...Did we mention Izaya's a troll?]]▼
** An article was about a movement to shut down hospitals because "despite rapid advancement in medical technology, the world death rate remains at 100%."▼
** Another article said that children are universally opposed to children's health care, with responses to the question "Do you want to go to the doctor?" ranging from "NO!!!!" to "inconsolable crying," but no children in favor.▼
=== Comic Books ===
* There is a semi-famous magazine article from 1958 called "The Dread Tomato Addiction" that correlates consumption of tomatoes with everything from death to communism. It can be found [http://www.crystaloak.com/Gaijin/Essay/tomato_addiction.htm here]. There is a similar article about bread that can be seen [http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/bread.asp here].▼
* An old ''[[Archie Comics
* [[Batman|The Penguin]] says this quote word-for-word in ''Detective Comics'' #684, at the same time pulling a [[You Have Failed Me...]] on a newly-acquired henchman who, through usage of statistics, "proved" that a broad daylight robbery had a 0% chance of being foiled by Batman.▼
=== Literature ===
▲* There is a semi-famous magazine article from 1958 called "The Dread Tomato Addiction" that correlates consumption of tomatoes with everything from death to communism. It can be found [
* Spoofed by ''[[The Daily Show|America: The Book]]'', which included a graph on "Growth of Misleading Charts". Two different bar heights represent the same number.▼
=== Live-Action TV ===
* ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' parodied the use/abuse of meaningless statistics in the sketch "Spectrum":
{{quote|'''Man:''' This bar in this column represents seventeen percent of the population. This one represents twenty-eight percent of the population! And this one represents ''forty-three percent'' of the population!
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That's only 90%.
Yeah, there was one guy who said the samples weren't big enough to be statistically significant. }}
* A commonly-cited factoid about the American Revolution is that roughly 1/3 of the residents of the Thirteen Colonies favored independence from Britain, 1/3 opposed it, and 1/3 were undecided or apathetic. The comedy series ''[[History Bites]]'' (based on the premise: what if TV had been around for 5,000 years) parodied Tom Paine as a spin-doctoring pundit:▼
▲* Spoofed by ''[[The Daily Show|America: The Book]]'', which included a graph on "Growth of Misleading Charts". Two different bar heights represent the same number.
▲* An old [[Archie Comics|Archie]] story had one of the characters becoming a statistics-obsessed nut [[Negative Continuity|for the duration of the story]], only for Jughead to start citing statistics that horrified them and lead them to run away in fright, at which point [[Embarrassing Middle Name|Forsythe]] noted that some ridiculously high percentage of people who quote statistics "make 'em up on the spot!"
▲* [[Batman|The Penguin]] says this quote word-for-word in ''Detective Comics'' #684, at the same time pulling a [[You Have Failed Me]] on a newly-acquired henchman who, through usage of statistics, "proved" that a broad daylight robbery had a 0% chance of being foiled by Batman.
▲* A commonly-cited factoid about the American Revolution is that roughly 1/3 of the residents of the Thirteen Colonies favored independence from Britain, 1/3 opposed it, and 1/3 were undecided or apathetic. The comedy series ''History Bites'' (based on the premise: what if TV had been around for 5,000 years) parodied Tom Paine as a spin-doctoring pundit:
{{quote|TOM PAINE: Only 1/3 of the colonists are opposed to independence. Now, you can't let a minority opinion like that influence public policy!
INTERVIEWER: But the same number are in favor of independence.
TOM PAINE: But now we're talking half of ''decided voters'', which is essentially a majority. You can't ignore the wishes of half of decided voters! }}
** The original "statistic" doesn't come from any actual poll anyway... it was an estimation made by John Adams, and he admitted he'd not done any research on that, just that it was his feeling on the matter.
* ''[[Penn
* The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster has semi-famously pointed out the obvious correlation between the [http://www.venganza.org/images/spreadword/pchart1.jpg decreasing number of pirates worldwide and Global Warming.]▼
=== Web Comics ===
* There's a billboard along a freeway in Michigan, advertising a dentist willing to do implants for only a couple hundred dollars. Next to it is a statement saying "Voted best dental office in Michigan". Just below that, in smaller text, is the disclaimer "by our dental staff".▼
* ''[[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]]'' tells us [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2275 how to make anything a victimless crime].▼
* ''[[Luke Surl]]'' expresses this via [[Visual Pun]] [http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/3105 here].▼
* ''[[xkcd]]'' uses this trope and a bit of bad math to justify staying indoors in the title text to [https://xkcd.com/2599/ this strip]:
{{quote|You say this daily walk will reduce my risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 30%, but also increase my risk of death by bear attack by 300%? That's a 280% increased! I'm not a sucker; I'm staying inside.}}
=== Web Original ===
▲* ''[[The Onion]]'' does parody this from time to time.
▲** An article was about a movement to shut down hospitals because "despite rapid advancement in medical technology, the world death rate remains at 100%."
▲** Another article said that children are universally opposed to children's health care, with responses to the question "Do you want to go to the doctor?" ranging from "NO!!!!" to "inconsolable crying," but no children in favor.
* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s [http://www.cracked.com/article_20318_the-5-most-popular-ways-statistics-are-used-to-lie-to-you_p2.html The 5 Most Popular Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You] covers some fallacies commonly used to lie with statistics.▼
=== Western Animation ===
* One episode of ''[[The Boondocks]]'' had Uncle Ruckus, an [[Uncle Tom]] racist, declare about the (black) man who invented peanut butter and hundreds of other uses for peanuts: "George Washington Carver was the man responsible for more ''peanut allergy deaths'' than any man '''in history'''!"
* An episode of ''[[The Simpsons]]'' featured Homer forming a vigilante group to fight crime. At one point he recruits Jimbo (who calls the group "the drunken posse") on the basis that he can swing a sack full of doorknobs. Homer later gives an interview to the local news:▼
▲* [[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]] tells us [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2275 how to make anything a victimless crime].
▲* An episode of [[The Simpsons]] featured Homer forming a vigilante group to fight crime. At one point he recruits Jimbo (who calls the group "the drunken posse") on the basis that he can swing a sack full of doorknobs. Homer later gives an interview to the local news:
{{quote|'''Kent Brockman:''' Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack beatings are up a shocking ''nine hundred percent''?
'''Homer:''' Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. ''Forfty'' percent of all people know that. }}
▲* ''Luke Surl'' expresses this via [[Visual Pun]] [http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/3105 here].
=== Other Media ===
▲* The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster has semi-famously pointed out the obvious correlation between the [http://www.venganza.org/images/spreadword/pchart1.jpg decreasing number of pirates worldwide and Global Warming.]
▲* There's a billboard along a freeway in Michigan, advertising a dentist willing to do implants for only a couple hundred dollars. Next to it is a statement saying "Voted best dental office in Michigan". Just below that, in smaller text, is the disclaimer "by our dental staff".
=== Real Life ===
* Two sports teams each only play one game in a season, and that game is against each other. How does the losing team make themselves sound good and their opponents sound bad? {{spoiler|They say they only lost one game all season, and that their opponents only won one game all season.}}
▲* Shizuo in [[Durarara!!]] maintains that the series's troll, Izaya, is behind ''every '''single''' weird thing in the setting.'' Sure, Shizuo can get irrational when mad, and will even use statistics and percents to maintain points. [[Properly Paranoid|...Did we mention Izaya's a troll?]]
▲* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s [http://www.cracked.com/article_20318_the-5-most-popular-ways-statistics-are-used-to-lie-to-you_p2.html The 5 Most Popular Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You] covers some fallacies commonly used to lie with statistics.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]
[[Category:Laws and Formulas]]
▲[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]
[[Category:Truth and Lies]]
[[Category:
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