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Return to E-mail Discussion page Previous in threadI agree with Brian, but with a caveat - a trivial and obvious caveat. Statistics when used by the critical eye are, of course, what you say, a way of summarizing information. However, we must realize that outside of the sciences often questions are much less well posed (I'm thinking of Political science in particular) or the audience for these numbers is of a less critical sort (i.e. the public at large). In these cases statistics are often misused in subtle ways by the person making an argument with them and, as such, are worse than damn lies. ...And then there is always the problem that correlation does not imply causation. I would argue that often statistics are used to imply a causation which does not necessarily exist. Joseph Biello |
