Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Lies Damned Lies And Statistics

"If enough data is collected, a board of inquiry can prove anything." - Murphy's Law of Combat #75

"90% of all statistics can be made to say anything...50% of the time."

Out-of-touch Marketing Guy, Direct TV Commercial

"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 'Forfty' percent of all people know that."

Homer Simpson, The Simpsons - "Homer the Vigilante"

This well-known saying is part of a phrase attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularized in the U.S. by Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Lies are not allowed in most spheres. Damned lies are probably worse somehow and still not allowed. Statistics however...

With the magic of numbers you can lie without getting into trouble!

The fact is that most people do not pay attention to the context, just the numbers. For example the statement 85% fat free sounds really good, until you realize that this means the food product is presumable 15% fat by weight. Also "fastest growing" could just mean that they have a tiny customer base and just got a few hundred new customers, a 500% plus increase.

A symptom of the way people use statistics, one might compare it to a drunk using a lamp post, for support, not illumination.

Examples:

During World War One helmets were almost withdrawn from British soldiers when it was noticed that the rate of head wounds had shot up after their issue. The reason? A person who dies from a bullet in the brain is a "casualty." A man with severe concussion or a skull fracture a "head wound." The rate of head wounds shot up and one of the "Helmets are expensive and cause cowardice" politicians decided to leap on it. He never used the total figure, only the one figure that helped his case.
Something of a historical subversion: During WWII, the air force wanted to add more armour to their planes, but because of weight limits they needed to know which places needed the armour most. So, they examined the planes after they came back and counted how often bullet holes were found in certain areas... and then placed armour in places that showed the fewest bullet holes. This is because, they assumed, that any place that did have bullet holes was a place that planes could be hit and still fly.
Let's say you want to "prove" that video games cause violence. First, you need to get a group of scientists that are already savvy to this and don't mind the lack of ethics. Then, you have them draw from a very small pool of test subjects that are known to display violent behavior. Mental hospitals, prisons, schools for children with behavior disorders, what have you. Do some generic tests that are guaranteed to show up positive, come up with numbers, and presto, instant headline. "Recent test shows 77% of subjects become more violent after playing Mortal Kombat". This works because the plebs you're trying to convince will not read the article the whole way through. Most will just look at the headline and that's all you really need to quote at speeches and debates. This also works with Comic Books, and with Rock, Hip hop, porn, watching Brokeback Mountain, voting Democratic, voting Republican... actually, every known behavior can be presented to encourage violence and other unpleasant things. Must be a strange subversion of Rule Thirty Four.
An Australian national newspaper once received a letter from a man who was shocked to discover that 50% of Australian children scored lower on test scores than the average. Think about that...
- But be careful. Question: How many people have more legs than the average? Answer: Almost everyone. This is because the number of three-legged people are greatly outnumbered by one-legged people, so the mean (i.e. the posh mathematical way of saying that which most people think of as the 'average' [total sum divided by number of values]) number of legs is a little bit lower than 2.
- Similarly, the original shocking fact is only a "no duh" situation if "average" means "median". Ideally, most children would score relatively high on the scale, so it would be possible to be much more of an outlier on the low end than on the high end, so at least a little more than half the children should have grades above the mean.
Consider the following. "Most car accidents occur close to home." The implication from that sentence alone is that somehow being close to home "causes" accidents; perhaps people are less careful. However, add this fact; Most driving occurs close to home.
- It's a bit like the "statistics" on shark shows. "You are more likely to die on the toilet than be eaten by a shark." When you compare how much time you spend around sharks versus how much time you spend around toilets ... I mean, really, the toilet has time to plan out its move in advance.
One ad (Valtrex) explicitly states that 1 in 5 American adults has genital herpes. There is no reference to any study or source. Even aside from that, when taking America's geography and population density into account, this can really only apply to heavily populated cities (although with modern transportation, it is still a very good idea to be paranoid).
One of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD)'s favourite weapons was a list of over 500 Americans they claimed were gamers who had committed suicide is the same year. Thus role playing games cause suicide. Except that 500 suicides a year is a lower percentage of suicides than clergy and a tiny fraction of the average.
- Patricia Pulling, the leader of this organisation, once said in an interview that "8% of the Richmond VA-area population is involved with Satanic worship at some level." When asked where that figure came from, she said that she estimated 4% of the teenagers and 4% of the adults. She then added them together and got the 8% (making this a You Fail Statistics Forever as well).
(Warning: This Troper anecdote to follow) This editor, while working in a university athletic department, was given the task of writing a puff piece on a member of the basketball team. This was made more difficult by the fact that said player was, as the kids these days say, not very good. While desperately searching for something positive to write, it was discovered that the player averaged a rather pathetic 2.3 points per game in the regular season. In a handful of postseason games, he averaged 3.0 points per game. The interpretation? "Player X really steps up in clutch situations, increasing his scoring by more than 30 percent in the NCAA tournament..."
Newspapers love doing this with drug related stories. It's almost impossible to see Ecstasy mentioned in a British newspaper without the qualifier "That killer drug", the supporting statistic is of course that a dozen people die per year from consuming it. Yet over the course of a year they will rack up an impressive body count in stories about fatal car accidents without ever devolving into calling cars "Those murderous rampaging kill bots" How many Britons drive? How many take E?
- A related strategy was used by US president Richard Nixon to portray marijuana as a gateway drug. His anti-drug team estimated that 80% of marijuana users go on to use cocaine, a figure which they obtained by taking the number of cocaine users and dividing it by the number of those users who had started by using marijuana. This ignored the fact tht out of all marijuana users, only about one in 2,400 go on to use cocaine.
  - And of course there's a very good reason most cocaine users have used pot. Cocaine is both more physically damaging and more illegal than mearijuana, thus almost anyone willing to use cocaine is willing to use pot, and anyone not willing to do pot is not willing to do cocaine. Same reason most pot users have used caffeine at some point.
"Nine out of ten dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." The tenth dentist was insistent that his patients never chew gum at all, but surprisingly, Trident didn't want you to know about that.
- Nine Out Of Ten Doctors Agree has been practically a stock phrase in advertising since the early 20th century.
- This kind of pitch was beautifully skewered by Stan Freberg in the early 1960s in an ad for Chun King Chinese food: the nine recommending doctors were all smiling Asians; the tenth, a scowling Anglo.
- "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."
- The great question never answered is: Why do the tenth Doctor/Dentist/Lawyer/Fireman/Whoever doesn't use/approves the product.
  - A Mad Magazine cartoon answered this: "Four out of five dentists recommend you floss daily!" The fifth dentist is a surly-looking individual who mutters "I'm sure you have better things to do with your time.."
  - Pearls Before Swine occasionally has the Five Doctors follow Rat around to comment on his activities. The fifth doctor is ALWAYS The Runt At The End.
  - You're telling me that you'd believe them if they said all ten doctors/dentists/lawyers/firemen/whoever approve of the product? A 100% result is far less believable than a 99% result; our brains refuse to accept that the rounded even number is correct. Which is why you'll see cars selling for $19,999 and not $20,000.
  - Not quite the same. $19,999 doesn't look more credible, it looks smaller by virtue of having a 1 instead of a 2 as the first digit. And with prices, smaller is good.
  - Acutally the main reason is probably so they can say "Available for "under" 20,000 Dollars!" in an ad and not be sued.
  - This troper can't recall the comedian who said it, but the comedian suggested that the fifth dentist says, "Chew all the sugar crap you want. You can help pay for my yacht."
Yes Minister has a very interesting section on this. In a discussion about conscription, Sir Humphrey demonstrates to Bernard how statistics can be obtained which prove both sides of the discussion correct, through the use of leading questions which are not included in the reporting of the survey concerned.
Recent phone polls for The Advertiser only had four people ring up for one of their questions, leading to the result of 80% supporting it, 20% rejecting it. How, with 4 people, the result wasn't a multiple of 25% had something to do with "sampling error." Something really vague, that is.
Penn & Teller's Bullshit point it by having a man who makes pool research for the Republicans show he can make someone give two different answers to the same question by first asking: "Do you think the government expends too much in healthcare for immigrants?" The bystander answers "Yes". When he asks: "Would you deny an immigrant the right to treat himself? To give birth in a hospital? Etc..." and other medical services that go well beyond what the governments expends with immigrant healthcare, the answer now is: "No". Also, they make fun of the guy with his own mathematical wizardry by pointing out: "In this scene, ten cars pass by behind him. One guy from one of the cars shouts saying he sucks. This means that AT LEAST 10% of the American population believes he sucks".
Howard Huff's "How To Lie With Statistic" was printed in the 50's. It's usually available on eBay and is a very easy read that shows you all the basics.
It's been said that more people die in car accidents than on airplanes. While this is true, planes are significantly riskier per length of time spent on one. People tend to spend much more time in cars than on planes, so the number looks worse.
- However, planes are safer per distance travelled. One generally wants to choose a method of travel to go a fixed distance, not to go a fixed time.
Statistically, there are 2 Popes per square kilometer in the Vatican, which is 1/2 of a square kilometer. Tee-hee, funny joke ... but remember that, the next time someone tells you how many Republicans or Democrats there are in a particular region. Did they count them?
Bayesian Probability throws up a lot of these as it depends on the statement 'the probability of x given y' and how this should affect your perceptions. My favourite is where confessing to a crime is more likely to make you innocent - the idea being that for certain big-ticket crimes like organised crime or terrorism the perpetrators are more likely to be trained in resisting interrogation and will never confess, whereas a 'normal' person will confess, telling the interrogator what they want to hear.
A recent Ars Technica article discussed the statistics usually used by software developers to complain about piracy. Specifically, the article pointed out that the statistics most commonly cited are most likely not only bullshit, but old bullshit. Amusingly enough, the image used for the related post on Gamepolitics was a pie chart divided into three sections, marked "Lies/Damned Lies/Statistics".
A recent Trojan Condoms commercial claims that the United States ranks between two African nations in HIV cases. This means nothing, since the population of the USA is much higher than either of those countries!
Anti-pornography activists sometimes cite studies showing a correlation between areas with higher rates of pornography consumption and higher rates of rape. While this is true, there's an even bigger correlation between rape and the consumption of non-pornographic "manly" magazines like Field and Stream and Guns & Ammo, yet no one suggests that preventing men from reading magazines about hunting and guns would lead to less rape.
- Advocating a ban on something because its consumption correlates with rape is very dangerous. Even if there were a causal link, consumption is affected by factors other than availability, and increased availability of pornography reduces rape.
Even QI falls victim to this from time to time. One question was "What is three times more dangerous than war?" The answer given was work, because three times as many people are killed each year in work-related accidents than die in wars. Now, consider how much time you spent working last year compared to how long you were in a warzone.
- Of course, QI is well known for deliberately phrasing questions like this in order to confuse the participants.
Played for laughs in one Dilbert strip: The Pointy Haired Boss is upset because 40% of all sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays. With a little bit of thought, he would have realized that that's perfectly normal. (To be fair, if he was capable of a little bit of thought, he wouldn't be a Pointy Haired Boss. Well, he would, because he's the Trope Namer, but... oh, forget it.)

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