ALL ABOUT MISLEADING STATISTICS

                                                                             

                                                                                         

     
                                               In my opinion, the vast majority of 'evidence-based' conclusions are actually 'spuriously-evidence based' . Moreover, such conclusions are extensively used by the Establishment to mind control and manipulate the population.


                                               Professor David Spiegelhalter's Interview



                                                                               

                                                YOUTUBE VIDEO




                                                                             

                                                Misleading graphs  (BBC bitsize)





                                                                         

                                                 



                                               31 Misleading graphs and statistics (pdf)


                                               Lying with Statistics (pdf)



                                                                               

                                               More lies, damned lies, and statistics


                                              Responsible thinking


                                           SIMPSON'S PARADOX (Youtube video)

Simpson's Paradox is more than just a curiosity, it illustrates how important it is to interperet your data correctly. If you are not careful it is still possible to have good data and bad conclusions.

                                              EXAMPLES OF SPURIOUS CORRELATION


                                             SPURIOUS CORRELATION (Wiki)


                                                           

                                               MY 2014 INTERVIEW IN STATISTICS VIEWS

5. You are also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. The getstats campaign by the Royal Statistical Society focuses on improving the public’s understanding of statistics in every-day life. Do you think that the public’s understanding of statistics has improved in recent years? What can be done to improve it further?

I think that the general public understand the statistics which are meted out to them by the Establishment all too well i.e. statistics are very often politically motivated and all too often quite misleading. Indeed, too much emphasis is placed on classical p-values which do not actually measure practical significance, and many apparent correlations can be made spurious by the presence of confounding variables. Data is sometimes even rearranged or shuffled, or important variables omitted, to give appropriately optimistic projections. ‘Evidence-based conclusions‘ based on observational data and non-randomised experiments often turn out to be ‘spuriously evidence-based’. I refer, for example, to Jim and Margaret Cuthbert’s splendid presentation during the Royal Statistical Society’s recent debate in Edinburgh on the Statistics of the Referendum.

I believe that most statistical investigations are inherently subjective in nature, and that statisticians should no longer attempt to achieve ‘false objectivity’. Rather than attempting to educate the public in a possibly misleading manner, I think that our leading statistical societies should focus on encouraging their members to invariably insist on fairness, professionalism, and impartial honesty, while acknowledging the subjective nature of their conclusions. It is only then that we can hope to properly educate the public regarding the real benefits that can be gained from statistical investigations.

The Royal Statistical Society has of course made some wonderful attempts to educate the public in their magazine Significance. However, one of my non-statistical friends who reads my copies of Significance remains quite cynical. He indeed wonders whether statistics can do much more than reiterate the obvious.

I believe that most statistical investigations are inherently subjective in nature, and that statisticians should no longer attempt to achieve ‘false objectivity’. Rather than attempting to educate the public in a possibly misleading manner, I think that our leading statistical societies should focus on encouraging their members to invariably insist on fairness, professionalism, and impartial honesty, while acknowledging the subjective nature of their conclusions. It is only then that we can hope to properly educate the public regarding the real benefits that can be gained from statistical investigations.

6. At the recent Future of Statistical Sciences workshop, there was much talk about Big Data and a concern that many ‘hot areas’ such as big data/data analytics, which have close connections with statistics and the statistical sciences, are being monopolised by computer scientists and/or engineers. What do statisticians need to do to ensure their work and their profession get noticed?

Large scale number crunching is unlikely to work well in any truly meaningful sense without careful statistical and scientific interpretation of what is going on in relation to the real-life background of the data, and to any supplementary anecdotal evidence which may be at hand. For their work and their profession to get noticed, statisticians simply need to do their job properly by, for example, combining anecdotal evidence with the information in the numerical data.