What Role do Statistics have in our Society:

In my opinion, statistics play a vital role in every field of human activity. Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data. It has become an important tool in the work of many academic disciplines such as medicine, education, engineering and physics, etc. It is also very essential in many aspects of society such as business, industry and government. For example, businesses use statistics to find customer preferences, check the quality of products, market products, estimate costs and make decisions. While bankers use statistics to estimate the number of people depositing money versus the number requesting loans. Due to the increasing use of statistics in so many areas of our lives, it has become very desirable to understand and practice statistical thinking.

New things I learned from this article:

http://www.truthpizza.org/logic/stats.htm

After reading this article I learned that statistics plays a major role in our society, however it is extremely difficult to create a polling question that not only produces reliable information but is also unbiased towards a certain opinion. It has also allowed me to view statistics from a different perspective and see all the flaws and fabrications that are involved in this process. Although statistics may be very useful we have to be very cautious when using them to ensure that they are accurate.

Different problems with statistics:

Faulty Statistics: The problem with statistics is that they can easily be fabricated or misrepresented. However, since they use specific numbers, they have a quality of authority about them, and the public might be a little less skeptical about the authenticity of the information.

Bad Sampling: Often, statistics are obtained by taking a sample from a larger group, although this method is very useful it has several important limitations.  When we are using this technique we are assuming that the whole group has the same characteristics as the sample, the people are picked at random and don’t have a bias towards a certain opinion.

Unfair poll questions: This is a very significant issue because statistics can be incorrect if the poll was constructed under a biased opinion. Polls can be rigged to get a desired answer so it is very important to understand what was asked in the poll to determine whether the results were reliable.

Statistics can be true but misleading: Even when statistics are technically accurate they may be misleading. When someone wants to use statistics to make a point they might dramatize certain facts, choose the starting and ending points for data, etc.

Ranking statistics: Some problems with ranking statistics is that it is not always clear what the categories are that are being ranked and it does not tell us about the actual amount involved.

Qualifiers on statistics: In this situation, statistics are created to appear more impressive by placing qualifications on them that may not seem important. These qualifiers create certain categories and manipulate the language in order to generate a specific response.

Percentages: When statistics are being presented as percentages, they are sometimes made to sound dramatic. As the population we are not aware of the exact values when using percentages causing the numbers to seem larger or smaller than the specified number.