He was being polite. Very polite. There are tonnes of red herrings in statistics.
Or as Mark Twain put it: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
The thing is that statistics is a way to generalize automatically, and that should be done carefully.
A good modern day example is the United Arab Emirates. I we look at the average income there we find that the citizens in UAE are the richest people in the world. Actually they are quite poor. But there are a few Sheiks there who own juat about everything. Those few people are the rich ones and they are very very rich. but for each of them there are thousands who are not rich at all.
Another problem with statistics is that they make it very easy to lie, and even enables you to lie while saying nothing but the truth. Have a look at the graph below: What a huge increase in government employment over private sector employment! We really must DO SOMETHING about it!! The Damn Gummint is wasting our hard-earned tax dollars hiering burocrats!!!
But take a closer look at the vertical scale, it starts at 800 and end at 1400, so a 'true' graph would have blank space from zero up to 800 below the part of the graph that is shown. And then it is all nowhere near that dramatic, both public and private employment have risen, and they seem to more or less follow eachother, should we be surprized?
Thanks for answering. I thought this one was going to miss a response. And thanks for the interesting summary and illustration.
D.K.Loven was just an ordinary member of the ask.com Q&A community. He was a Christian and was defending an argument against an atheist who went all statistical on him. I thought it was a clever comment and kept it.
JakobA the unAmerican. 