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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
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This well-known saying is part of a phrase often attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularized in the U.S. by Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Numbers and formulas are supposed to represent "objective scientific data" you cannot deny which have been examined by intelligent and experienced experts. The Consummate Liar wants his forgeries to look undeniably "scientific", so why not use the magic of numbers that the not-so-math-literate masses could never deny? They say that statistics don't lie, and while that may be true, liars do use statistics. This trope covers all instances of Artistic License – Statistics where someone manipulates statistics to present a misleading picture of the truth. The problem is, people do not pay attention to the context, just the numbers. For example, the statement "Brand X is 84% fat-free" sounds good until you realize that this means the food product is 16% fat by weight. Also, "fastest-growing" could mean that there used to be one customer and then there were five more, making a five-hundred percent increase. You should also notice Absolute Comparatives: it's fastest-growing, but specifically compared to when/what? The whole business of throwing percentages at people in advertising, politics, and other forms of propaganda is almost destined for this kind of abuse. Relative measures are more likely to be understood accurately, and thus are less likely to be used in advertising. The bogus uses of statistics are intended to imply a causal link between two elements when they are not linked, the link is questionable, or the link is opposite to what is implied. A beautiful example? "Coca-Cola causes drowning". By looking at statistics on drowning and Coca-Cola sales, you can see a link — more people go swimming on hot days, and more people buy Coke on hot days. Likewise, birth rates per head of population are higher in areas where there are more storks — because birth rates are always higher in rural areas, which is where one finds the Delivery Stork. Correlation does not equal causation; if it does, then we might also conclude that global warming is caused by a decline in pirate population and that 100% of Homo Sapiens who consume dihydrogen monoxide will cease vital functions and decompose. Be aware of the Law of Very Large Numbers. Any fraction of a very large number is likely to be a large number, no matter how small the fraction is. It is estimated that 2,135,000 Americans have used cocaine (including crack) in the past month. But that's only 0.7% of the population! So, is this a lot of people, or not? You should also be on the lookout for the related effect where things are made more remarkable than they really are. The odds that any given ticket will win a raffle may be very small, but it is certain that one will be a winner. You'd notice being dealt a royal flush in spades at poker, but the odds of it happening are exactly the same as those for being dealt any other hand of five specified cards. Then you can get the kind of statistical abuse in which you are careful to define the question to get you the answer you want. What is the most popular book in the world? Depends if you mean most copies in existence (Quotations from Chairman Mao), most copies ever sold (The Bible) or fastest-selling ever (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). Statistics are like studies: who made them and who paid them matters a lot. Want to "prove" that video games cause violence? Get a group of scientists that are already savvy about this and don't mind the lack of ethics. 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." Most people won't bother with reading the article the whole way through and will just look at the headline. This works with anything from comic books and rock to watching Brokeback Mountain or voting for specific parties, basically anything. See Push Polling for a specific form of this. Confirmation Bias, or the tendency for people to search out statistics that support their preconceived notions and ignore statistics that don't, is the reason for many of the entries on this list. The forgery mentioned above is also the reason most scientific and medical studies are done double-blind (meaning it's all anonymous, neither the researchers nor the participants know who's in the experimental group nor who's in the control group) and should allow for a chance at being falsified by Real Life (see also The Scientific Method). But you should beware of any advertisements touting a "double-blind" study, especially late-night ads because they tend to violate the truth-in-advertising laws. In the end, statistics are not lies and statistics don't lie: people lie about the statistic itself or how it is interpreted. Some don't lie, they are simply ignorant, as are most members of the public in terms of statistical interpretation. See Logical Fallacies. Put another way, by baseball announcer Vin Scully: Nine out of Ten Doctors Agree is a sub-trope. Compare Selective Stupidity, doing some Manipulative Editing to make people appear stupid. Contrast Absolute Comparative, where the use of statistics is avoided entirely by comparing the product to nothing. Subtrope of Lying by Omission, where the omission is the context of the statistics. When adding examples, please remember that this trope is not about amusing statistical fallacies, but about using statistics to misrepresent the truth. |
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Sleepless Domain: An early interstitial features a Magical Girl recruitment poster, which lists the benefits for active magical girls to register with the BMG. Among these, it cheerfully notes that registered magical girls have a 70% lower chance of experiencing serious injuries or fatalities than those who haven't registered. Note the lack of any absolute numbers in that statement — just how many registered girls are killed or injured on the job, and how many more are unregistered? | |
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FreedomToons: Often, the videos will point out how some statistics that could be seen as a good thing give off a false impression. Both "Government Good, Guns Bad!" and "Support Gun Control You Child Hating Bigot!!" point out that while gun violence in Australia has gone down since its gun ban, gun violence was already going down at an identical rate before its gun ban was put into law. In "Only 2% Of Rape Accusations Are False???", Seamus calmly breaks down the actual statistics behind this claim and the uncomfortable truth that in the vast majority of cases, there's no conclusive proof either way. This is the bread and butter of "The Debunkers" series, which stars two men living in a bomb shelter who spend their free time debunking YouTube videos. If a video they're analyzing gives a statistic, they'll cite the full context of the statistic which usually gives off a different impression than the out-of-context statistic implies: "Debunkers vs. Medicare for All" goes into detail about the Canadian Healthcare System, and the myth that universal healthcare would fix everything. While it does have a universal healthcare system, there's so much red tape and bureaucracy that people can end up waiting months for emergency surgery, and citizens end up leaving Canada to find better healthcare in other countries. It also notes that despite the problems with America's healthcare system, the nation ranks first in the world in terms of quality, whereas Canada is ranked seventh. "Debunkers vs. Abolishing the Electoral College" makes a statement that a pure popular vote is a bad idea. Claiming that it would lead to a case where states with large cities (Chicago for Illinois, Los Angeles for California, etc.) would eclipse the voices of less populated states. |
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In an episode of Psych, young Shawn attempts to justify his fear of shark attacks with the statistic that most shark attacks happen in about three feet of water. His dad points out that most swimming in general happens in about three feet of water. | |
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An episode of The Simpsons featured Homer forming a vigilante group to fight crime. At one point he recruits Jimbo (who calls the group "the drunken posse") on the basis that he can swing a sack full of doorknobs. Homer later gives an interview to the local news: | |
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An episode of Cyberchase featured Hacker using this. First, when trying to get hired as an exterminator at the Cybrary, he used two bar graphs that appeared to show that Hacker caught more bugs than his competitor but when the scales were added, Hacker's graph used smaller numbers than the other, causing the results to be inflated. Later, when the kids are trying to prove that the Cybrary is infested with bugs that are attacking the history section, he uses a graph with an inflated scale to make the bars look smaller and thus make there appear to be no problem. | |
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The Justice League was asked: "Maybe you'd care to explain why on your watch, 50% of marriages now end in divorce and the other 50% end in death!" Sounds terrible until you wonder how else are marriages supposed to end. A somewhat more reasonable one is Godfrey's claim that since the League formed, "white-collar crime is up 3%!" While a more damning statistic, it's also the one kind of crime that the League doesn't get involved in much (not to mention it's a pretty small increase that could easily be unrelated — or, given Godfrey's other 'stats', taken as a percentage of overall crime, i.e. white collar crime now makes up 3% more of crime as a whole, because other crimes are going down thanks to the Justice League). |
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In Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen, retired superheroine The Audit names her least favorite statistic as "seventy-four percent of super humans with a certain combination of hair style and color have powers with a 'possession' mechanic." As she points out, this is completely meaningless; "possession mechanic" is ill-defined, the sample size is stupidly small (nineteen people), and correlation is not causation. | |
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Tumblr has a meme that relies on a subversion of this for comedy, serving as an explanation of what a Statistical Outlier is. According to this meme, people in general do not eat 3 spiders every year. Rather, it is one guy named Spiders Georg, who eats over 10 000 spiders every night, who's messing with the results, which should be accounted for. | |
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: This strip argues that any theory has a small percentage chance of success, and since all those percentage chances amount to 100%, he can create billions of theories as to why he won't die, and one theory as to why he will, making the likelihood that he will die statistically insignificant. He still dies. |
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Dilbert: Dogbert once sold "value-priced lottery tickets;" half price, odds of winning only one in ten million less. The Pointy-Haired Boss tells the employees that he's found out that 40% of sick days are taken on Monday and Friday, and declares this to be "unacceptable". Asok laughs until he realizes that the boss is actually that stupid. |
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Cracked: The 5 Most Popular Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You covers some fallacies commonly used to lie with statistics. 8 obvious signs statistics are lying to you. |
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From 'Fat, French and Fabulous', "Statistically, the average person has slightly less than two legs." Statistics are fun when you don't use them properly. | |
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xkcd: This strip concludes that the news media got the supposed relationship between cell phones and cancer backward, i.e., cancer causes cell phones. Also this one, which combines it with a dash of Hypocritical Humor: And one about the significance of 95% confidence when you run 20 tests and only publish the interesting one. Another comic points out that the observed mortality rate among humans is only 93%, overthrowing most "100% of people who do X die" statistics. And again, noting that you could send customers a live bobcat instead of their ordered item 1/30 times and still have a 97% positive rating on Ebay. |
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One of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD)'s favorite weapons was a list of over 500 Americans they claimed were gamers who had committed suicide in the same year. Thus role-playing games somehow cause suicide. Except that even if you take this bogus statistic at face value, 500 suicides a year is still a lower percentage of suicides than clergy and a tiny fraction of the average. Patricia Pulling, the leader of this organization, 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 (read: pulled from her butt) that 4% of the teenagers and 4% of the adults engaged in Satanic worship. She then added them together and got the 8%. Another time, BADD cited an increase in suicides corresponding with a major Dungeons and Dragons release. Again, however, there's no evidence that's not simply a coincidence, as similar statistics can be used to prove that the release of a Britney Spears CD caused suicide numbers to jump. |
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Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy has Brian Fantana's... somewhat questionable grasp of percentages, regarding his "Sex Panther" cologne: | |
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Batman: The Penguin says this quote word-for-word in Detective Comics #684, at the same time pulling a You Have Failed Me on a newly-acquired henchman who, through statistics, "proved" that a broad daylight robbery had a 0% chance of being foiled by Batman. | |
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Bowling for Columbine: Moore exaggerates the level of gun violence in the United States through spurious use of statistics, specifically comparing the amount of gun-related deaths in several western countries by citing gross figures for each country and not per capita stats. Even aside from that, the numbers he cites didn't match any known independent studies. Eventually, it was revealed that he took US Government crime statistics for gun homicides, and added uses of guns for self-defense and the use of guns by police. | |
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Yes, Minister: There's 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 that are not included in the reporting of the survey concerned. Another episode combines this with Hypocritical Humor; during one of their many arguments, Hacker brings up some facts to support his point only for Humphrey to superciliously note that Hacker's facts are based on statistics, which are thus unreliable as per this trope. When the argument gets a bit more heated, however, Humphrey begins to cite some statistics that prove his point, only to catch himself and quickly refer to them as 'facts'. Hacker is quick to point out the hypocrisy. |
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The Onion does parody this from time to time. An article was about a movement to shut down hospitals because "despite rapid advancement in medical technology, the world death rate remains at 100%." Another article said that children are universally opposed to children's health care, with responses to the question "Do you want to go to the doctor?" ranging from "NO!!!!" to "inconsolable crying," but no children in favor. |
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Spoofed by America (The Book), which included a graph on "Growth of Misleading Charts". Two different bar heights represent the same number. | |
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NCIS: In one episode, Abby is targeted by a hitman and becomes paranoid about her safety. At one point, she sets up a desk in the elevator, citing the low number of elevator-related deaths per year to prove that it's the safest place to be. Later, she gets over it, pointing out that her own logic was flawed. Since most people only spend a few minutes at a time in an elevator, they're simply less likely to experience a fatal event while they're in there, but since she was in there so long, her chances of dying in an elevator were skyrocketing (which is also flawed, but she was under a lot of stress at the time). | |
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The Boondocks episode "The Color Ruckus" showed Uncle Ruckus as a child, being homeschooled by his mother, who at one point made this claim about George Washington Carver: | |
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An old Archie story had one of the characters becoming a statistics-obsessed nut for the duration of the story, only for Jughead to start citing statistics that horrified them and lead them to run away in fright, at which point Forsythe noted that some ridiculously high percentage of people who quote statistics "make 'em up on the spot!" | |
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In Asterix and Cesaer's Gift, when Orthopedix is challenging Vitalstatistix for chiefship, he tries to court Fulliautomatix's vote by buying his anvil. Later, during the debate, Vitalstatistix says under that his leadership anvil sales went up 100%, and Orthopedix replies that you can make statistics prove anything you like. | |
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Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges famously use the statistic that none of the people they execute will ever commit another felony again as proof that death is the cure for crime. | |
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The Wire: A major theme in the series is how organizations will "juke the stats" to make it look like the organization is more successful than it is. The police department will downgrade crimes (changing them to similar but less serious crimes) when filing them to make it look as though the rate of violent and major crimes are going down, or start focusing on low-level, trivial arrests to make the conviction rates go up. When ex-cop Prez gets a job as a teacher, he immediately notices very similar tricks being used to manipulate the standardized testing results and make it look like students are performing better than they really are. The stats have almost no relationship with real conditions, and making the stats look good almost always gets in the way of institutions fulfilling their actual function. | |
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Monty Python's Flying Circus parodied the use/abuse of meaningless statistics in the sketch "Spectrum": | |
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Fat Head: The obesity epidemic is actually because the parameters for who is considered overweight vs. obese was changed. Then there is the shift in age demographics; when the median age of the population changes from 26 years old to 35 years old, it's to be expected that the average person's weight would be an extra 10 pounds. Ethnic diversity also plays a role, with African Americans and Latinos more prone to heavier builds. Tom even noted that it took him several hours on a busy street corner to find even a handful of shots of extremely heavy people. He argues that these statistics are manipulated by NGOs with political agendas and government agencies that are more concerned with securing funding than actually solving problems. Ancel Keys deliberately messed with his research to "prove" the lipid hypothesis. Keys threw out more than half the countries he examined because their data did not fit his theory that animal fats are bad for human health. For instance, Chile ate little fat but got a lot of heart disease, while Norway and Holland ate a lot of fat but got little heart disease. Keys was not the only one who deliberately messed with data, either. |
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QI is well known for deliberately phrasing questions like this in order to confuse the participants. One question was "What is three times more dangerous than war?"note Three wars? 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. This prompted unhelpful responses from the panelists: "What if you're a soldier?" "What if you work in a shoe shop, near a war?" | |
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Shizuo in Durarara!! maintains that the series's troll, Izaya, is behind "99% of all the weird crap" that goes on the setting. Sure, Shizuo can get irrational when mad, and will even use statistics and percents to maintain points. ...Did we mention Izaya's a troll? We can only assume that he means every single weird thing. | |
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Penn & Teller: Bullshit! point it out by having a man who makes poll 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 health care 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?" and other medical services that go well beyond what the governments expend with immigrant health care, 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". | |
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