John,
I meant that in looking at statistics people need to engage their skills
at critical thinking. The doubling example for instance.
Here is another one
Anorexia claims the lives of 150,000 women a year, according to
frequently-cited texts like Gloria Steinem’s Revolution From Within and Al
Gore adviser Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (both 1992) and a column from
Ann Landers (Apr. 29 1992, Boston Globe). But the figure is a
misinterpretation of a study finding 150,000 cases a year, almost none of
them fatal.
150,000 women dead! The number of total cancer deaths in the U.S. alone
was around 500,000 for the same time period!
Here is another one
http://www.stats.org/newsletters/0007/africa.htm
Simple reporting the estimated number of AIDS/HIV cases in Africa could be
seriously misleading.
In other words, when a statistic is presented the person reading/hearing
about the statistic needs to think.
That was the sole implication of my comment.
Steve
--- John Foster <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Steve comments:
>
>
> Of course John. Innumeracy is a big problem. For example, the worst
> social statistic of all time was
>
> "Since 1950 the number of American Children killed by handguns has
> doubled
> every year."
>
> Next comment posted Steve was:
>
> Oops, my mistake.
>
> The 550 billion number was for 1989.
>
> Then next comment posted is in response to John:
>
> > How many wildlife were killed by handguns during this period of
> time?[JF]
>
> Steve: Beats me and I don't see the relevance. The topic had drifted to
> "lying
> with numbers".
>
> Finally Steve comments that he is off topic with his allusion to hand
> guns
> and statistics:
>
> "Anyhow this is getting very far afield of enviro-ethics. The point of
> the
> original post that spawned this was to show that inumeracy was a
> problem,
> not the fields of statistics and applied math. One has to use critical
> thinking when it comes to things like statistics, a failure to do so
> will
> result in accepting alot of junk."
>
>
> John here:
>
> What do you mean by critical thinking and how can it improve
> environmental
> quality?
>
>
> chao
>
> john foster
=====
"In a nutshell, he [Steve] is 100% unadulterated evil. I do not believe in a 'Satan', but this man is as close to 'the real McCoy' as they come."
--Jamey Lee West
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