Statistics are interesting - at least 50% of the time.
And often about as right.
Yet still we find them fascinating. Isn’t it interesting to know that:-
70% of all married couples are unhappy?
91% of all people wearing red shirts prefer a light beverage over a full meal for lunch
2 in 3 of all snails are squint
9 out of 10 doctors recommend every product advertized
And 100% of this is guesswork!
Statistics make everything sound so much more professional! I love hearing guys quote off long reels of statistics, quoting the best ones to other people, ignoring all the ones that don’t support their views and forgetting the whole lot in about ten minutes only to find more that just have to be shared!
I think it stems from childhood and receiving report cards from school telling you what percentage of your subject you actually knew and predicting your whole future based on that.
Art -60% - Shows potential, esp if we can get her to stop eating the crayons.
Math – 72% - with especially strong grasp of statistics.
Biology – 23% - will probably never breed at this rate.
And I love it when statistics change! Which they do quite often, I’m 41% no 81% sure they do! Like the percentage of divorces steadily increase (I contributed to that, praise me!) and the percentage of readers decrease (while the percentage of marshmellow brains increases in leaps and bounds as anyone who has to deal with morning traffic can tell you!)
And in the end we are all statistics! Get hit by a car – become an accident statistic. Avoid the car – stay a living, taxable statistic. Be male, female, other, young, old, in-between, black, white or an alarming green. Your simple existence makes you a statistic in a thousand different books! What the weather could be like; the risk of covering you for insurance; the chances this double fudge cake might not be nature's gift to a healthy lifestyle, (but you’ll ignore that and eat it any way...) There are statistics everywhere and they are nothing if not terribly interesting and delightfully quotable!
That's 100% of pretty much everything I planned to say on the subject!
I think, therefore I ... Ugh ADD. I think stats are one of our attempts as humans to reduce complexity. We think we are a lot smarter than we really are. To maintain this illusion, we make stuff around us simpler by reducing it to numbers. Bobby the snail knows his two siblings are squint, but he likes apples anyway and it seems that there is no statistical correlation between breeding and marks in biology.
ReplyDeleteHere's to being an outlier.