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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (48277)	5/27/2002 1:05:22 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

The problem with statistics is that it is so easy to abuse them even inadvertently. Of course it's trivial to abuse them intentionally, so you need to know enough about them to be able to figure out ways in which statistics, even if accurate, can be used falsely, but it's also essential to competent public policy discussion to know enough about them to avoid inadvertently using them inaccurately. Few people coming out of school graduate with that knowledge. Back in my teaching days, I taught a course titled "Mathematics and the Imagination," a popourri loosely based on the book of that name. Part of that course was a section on statistics in public life, for which I used How to Lie as a course reference. The exam for that section consisted in part of an exerpt from a newspaper article which was heavy on statistics trying to prove some point and requiring the students to analyze the statistics and list as many sources as they could of intentional and/or uinintentional bias. They were also given sets of statistics and asked to discuss points which could validly be made from the statistics, points which could be made that would appear valid to a casual reader of the statistics but wouldn't hold up to scrutiny, and ways an unscrupulous user could use the statistics to "prove" the opposite of what they validly showed. The students loved the section, and would up being wonderfully suspicious of every statistic they read for the rest of the year -- including some published by the school in its newsletters!