How to Lie With Statistics
Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Gary Arndt
4.7 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
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| 0:00.0 | Mark Twain once said there are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics. |
| 0:06.4 | The reason why he placed statistics into its own category is because it's possible to use |
| 0:11.1 | numbers to misrepresent the truth, distort reality, or outright lie. |
| 0:16.0 | However, if you know what to look for, you can catch misuses of statistics, |
| 0:20.0 | and if you really pay attention, you can find these misuses almost everywhere. |
| 0:24.7 | Learn more about how you can live with statistics on this episode of Everything Everywhere |
| 0:29.0 | Daily. The In the past I've done episodes on subjects such as logical fallacies, correlation |
| 0:50.0 | versus causation, and survivorship bias. |
| 0:53.0 | This episode is in the same ballpark insofar as it deals with critical thinking, |
| 0:58.0 | but it's a bit different in that it's more nuanced. |
| 1:01.0 | There's some overlap with the previous episodes I've done, but for the most |
| 1:04.8 | part it's different. The reason why it's different is that lying with statistics isn't necessarily |
| 1:11.4 | lying, which I suppose makes the title of this episode a lie. |
| 1:16.8 | It certainly can be lying, but more often than not, it might just be putting a positive |
| 1:21.1 | spin on something or interpreting data in such a way that it supports |
| 1:25.2 | a previous hypothesis. |
| 1:27.7 | The goal of this episode is to give you an idea of some of the things to look for when you hear |
| 1:31.7 | the results of studies, |
| 1:33.0 | surveys, or polling data. |
| 1:35.0 | This is important because if you pay attention to the news, |
| 1:37.8 | you will hear statistics reported all the time. |
| 1:40.7 | And there are big problems with a lot of statistics you see reported in the media. |
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