I think stats have a very important role in society and our world. It helps us understand little things like how much of our world is female or male, or how much of our world is in poverty. I think people often underestimate how much we use stats in our everyday lives. Some people have jobs that are strictly revolved around collecting data and analysing it to create stats. Sometimes, people are reluctant to trust stats because they are based on people and people are ever changing (i.e political stats). However I find stats extremely interesting and enjoy learning about them. Stats have a vital, yet quiet role in understanding the world that surround us.

After reading the article, I was enlightened to see all of the information put into the article. I loved how many examples there were for each problem, and how they clearly underlined the problem. I liked to see that they related most of the article to things we do in our everyday lives, and how we can often be fooled by stats. I like the strategies they gave us to analyse whether a stat was useful or not, and I will definitely be coming back to them. I love how the article broke down the language and how it was appropriate for our level. I really enjoyed the article overall, and would like to read more into statistics later on.

 

Problems with Statistics

Faulty statistics: Some stats are simply fabricated or embellished. People are more likely to believe something that is extremely detailed rather than something that is not. Simple things like changing the word ‘most’ to a large percentage can sway a person.

Bad sampling: The smaller the number of people you are sampling, better the percentage of luck playing a part in the poll. If you take 50 people to poll on sports teams, there is a chance that you came across 40 people who came from the sporting arena down the street to support the same team.

Unfair poll questions: Polls are quite often rigged to encourage one answer by the way they are phrased. Some polls also ask a series of questions to highlight one side of the argument before they get to the final question.

Statistics that are true but misleading: Sometimes, stats are technically true, but they don’t provide all the details necessary. They may talk about the increase of a percentage between two dates, although the information is true, the dates could have been arbitrarily picked because they couldn’t find any other poll to suit their purpose. Also, when presented with lots of information, it is easy to point out the biggest decrease or increase in a short amount of time, but in the long run, it didn’t actually change lots.

Ranking statistics: When ranking stats, sometimes it is unclear as to how the statistics are being divided up. For example, saying someone is the ‘fifth famous Russian person in the world’, we have no idea what qualifies them to be Russian. Do they have to be born in Russia or can they just be of Russian decent?

Qualifiers on statistics: It is common to put qualifiers on statistics that may not seem important, but without them, the statistic is incorrect. Sometimes, there may be so many qualifiers on the stat, that without them, the stat is really nothing special.

Percentages: When looking at a stat, it may be more powerful to say that a soccer player scored 20% of his team’s goals rather than saying he only scored 5 goals. When looking at things from a big point of view, it is better to look at the numbers rather than the percentages. Sometimes, percentages are completely useless and make no sense to the context of the statistic.