I think statistics have a big role in our society. We use it to measure peoples opinions, how they think and more. I think that people could also be influenced by it. Like if people didn’t know what to choose and one side has more votes then people would choose that side.
After reading the article.
I learned that there multiple problems with statistics. They try to influence your answer by putting things or not putting everything in the question. Depending on how they want you to answer they try to add words to make you lean to that decision. They put in technically not wrong information but makes it look better or worse, its like when someone doesn’t say the whole truth. These strategies reminds me of foods, when the bottle says less fat but the nutrition facts label says otherwise.
- Faulty Statistics – They can be simply be fabricated. Of course this could be true with any claim, but because statistics use specific numbers, they have a quality of authority about them, and we may be a little less suspicious that a statistical claim is false than we would be for a more descriptive argument.
- Bad Sampling – The way the people in the sample were picked might be biased toward a certain result.
- Unfair Poll Questions – The poll is constructed in such a way as to encourage a particular answer.
- Statistics that are true but misleading – Choosing the starting and ending points for data used is an easy way to deliberately manipulate statistics.
- Ranking Statistics – It is not always clear what the categories are that are being ranked.
- Qualifiers on Statistics – Putting qualifications on them that might not seem important, but really are.
- Percentages – Sometimes statistics are given in absolute terms and other times they are given in percentages. When dealing with facts on a large scale, we should prefer to look at numbers as percentages or in proportion to other quantities since absolute values don’t have direct meaning to us
