Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Difference between revisions

* 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.}}

* [[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).

* 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.