Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Difference between revisions

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This well-known saying is part of a phrase attributed to [[Benjamin Disraeli]] and popularized in the U.S. by [[Mark Twain]]:

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?

 

 

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.

* 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.

** 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.

 

== Other examples ==

* 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20090303181916/http://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].

* ''[[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!

That's only 90%.

Yeah, there was one guy who said the samples weren't big enough to be statistically significant. }}

{{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.

* 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'''!"

{{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. }}

* 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.}}

 

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[[Category:Laws and Formulas]]

[[Category:Truth and Lies]]