I especially like the snark at the end. This stuff isn’t hard. It ought to be part of the basic toolkit for critical thinking that kids get out of sixth grade.
Jorge Chan gets it right
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
EVERY day, I have to walk by the Fox News Studio to get to work, and usually end up reading their ticker. I always want to pound on the glass and scream at them whenever they say things like “Fox News Poll shows that 94% hate Obama and love puppies.”
As someone smarter then me once said, there’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Polls are more a psychological thing than anything else.
Structure leading poll question you know target audience will go for.
Make target audience feel they’re participating.
Report result and let hive-mind do the rest.
Dammit PZ, will you stop breaking other people’s toys!
My algebra students (especially business majors) often express exasperation at being required to take any math as part of their program of study. It’s so irrelevant! Since algebra is a prerequisite for statistics, I like to point out that statistics is math for self defense. If they want to stop being duped by scoundrels with bogus numbers, they need to learn what is significant and what is not. Some of the complainers are mollified. All of them appear to be surprised.
This is too much, PZ! Even you must know that 47.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot. You don’t need to bother with all this poll nonsense.
The ‘target’ audience is key here. As we’ve witnessed, and participated in, polls can be manipulated by an ‘invasive’ audience holding views contrary to those initiating the query – example, the silly ass ‘afterlife’ turd – surprise!
I saw this strip this morning and immediately thought of sending it in. But couldn’t be bothered. Glad someone else did! PHD comics, by the by, are consistently brilliant and always funny.
Surely sixth grade is about 5 years too late.
Unfortunately, innumerology is pervasive. After the Massachusetts special election, several news outlets came out with stories and headlines about “the end of the Democratic majority”. *sigh*
Proper use of a graph, coupled with correctly chosen error bars and judicious use of a finagle factor, can be used to prove anything. Consider the last two panels of this cartoon.
Cham not Chan, Pee Zee
But if evolution’s so right it should be really easy to convince the public that it’s right. That’s the “argument” for the importance that a lot of people propagandized and socialized to react against evolution in fact do not accept it.
And so stupidity builds upon stupidity to keep from learning something as simple as the basic case for evolution.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Ahem! Jorge Chan?
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” said that great skeptic, Mark Twain.
Innumeracy also means that anecdotal evidence is taken as evidence, and the belief that an instance of something counter to a trend is the trend.
“It’s snowing” or “This year is colder than last” means there’s no global warming trend. I doubt that 1 out of 10 people could explain the difference between climate and the weather.
NASA recently concluded that the past decade was the warmest in recent history, but we all know they’r a bunch of Commies.
Another common fallacy is concluding that the non-saintly behavior of scientists mean their conclusions are invalid. Science is not a beauty contest or a democracy.
Statistics may be lies, but facts are facts.
“Climategate: Scientists are mean girls–so what’s new?”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adventures-in-old-age/200912/climategate-scientists-are-mean-girls-so-what-s-new
It’s not just polls.
Over at CBS News, they’re running another story on a hairless piece of roadkill that they’re insinuating might be the elusive chupacabra. Of course, the creature turned out to be nothing more than a raccoon with a buzz cut.
Why do they keep doing these types of stories? Many members of the media, and the outlets they work for have absolutely no interest in scientific accuracy. It’s really all about entertainment.
After a hard day at the millworks, that’s what Joe Public wants, and that’s what the media gives him. Our mistake is in thinking they want something different, like truth and accuracy.
Ignorance and stupidity are in. The Marching Morons have finally arrived.
Seconding comment #11 – it’s Cham, with an m.
Here’s hoping PZ makes the correction at his first convenience.
The dangers of polls:
Unwarranted conclusions
And snarky cartoons
The quote is also attributed to Benjamin Disreali, Walter Bagehot, Arthur Balfour, Leonard Courtney (President of the Royal Statistical Society) and that prolific author, Anon.
All statistics are made up. Because I say so.
Also, let’s remember this: “Correlation does not imply causation.” Lovely words. Harsh, critical, ungenerous, yet beautiful.
@”Tis Himself, OM”
I was careful not to say he originated the quote, only that he said it, which is documentable:
North American Review, No. DCXVIII., July 5, 1907
Or as Picasso, or was it T.S. Eliot? may have said, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”
The second panel in the comic, Medieval News Network, reminds us of a program we used to watch on PBS that presented historical events, like the story of Joan of Arc, in the format of a modern newscast.
The newscasters were dressed in period clothing. It was an innovative way to present “boring” historical events in an entertaining way.
We really need to get back to that type of thing. Speaking of which, whatever in the hell happened to Bill Nye?
Disraeli said the line about lies and statistics. I say that any fool can lie with statistics. What takes skill is using them to tease out the truth!
A good small book on this subject is ‘How to lie with stastistics’ by Darrell Huff.
It’s written in 1954, but still current. Read it, and you’ll be 24% wiser…
There is a children’s show called History Bites that presents history lessons in comedy sketches.
Unfortunately it’s Canadian, so it occasionally highlights events that are of no interest to most American viewers, such as every single that’s ever happened that isn’t the Revolutionary War.
It ought to be part of the basic toolkit for critical thinking that kids get out of sixth grade. – PZ
Which should lead one to ask: “In whose interest is it that this is not the case?”.
Read it, and you’ll be up to 24% wiser… – loke.ase [bolded words added]
Careful there loke.ase – without my addition you could get sued for false advertising!
Unfortunately it’s Canadian, so it occasionally highlights events that are of no interest to most American viewers, such as every single that’s ever happened that isn’t the Revolutionary War. – Brownian, OM
Now, that’s just unfair! Americans are also interested in the
19141917-1918 and19391941-1945 wars!@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
According to Wikipedia. Take it for it’s worth: “the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli’s works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Other coiners have therefore been proposed. The most plausible, given current evidence, is Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
How wonderfully ironic that “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” has itself become one of those quotes that’s always misattributed!
@23 said
A good small book on this subject is ‘How to lie with stastistics’ by Darrell Huff.
You should have to pass a test on the contents of that book before you can graduate from high school.
Brownian:
Sounds cool and interesting. Will check it out. Thanks.
Sorry. I forgot how in those two wars you guys saved the world from tyranny, oppression, and future dead air on A&E’s History Channel.
It really is a clever show, Legion, but it is pretty Canadian. I wonder if many non-Canucks would recognise a parody of Don Cherry.
One thing I learnt from being good at maths is that it is a quality seldom seen in people, some just don’t have the brain for that type of thinking. It’s no surprise really that such basic misuse of statistics takes place, nor that logical fallacies such as argumentum ad populum are commonplace in the media. It’s how we think when we don’t know how to think.
I loved how in #3 the scores are 99% and 67% for a grand total of 166%.
Margin of Error is completely misunderstood-
http://twoandahater.blogspot.com/2009/11/margin-of-error-in-polling.html
All the talk of questionable polls reminds me of this:
Opinion Polls: Getting the results you want
(Yes, Prime Minister, BBC)
well, there have been some famously awesome pie charts like that on Fox News…
I hesitate when using/recalling statistics to back up a point for precisely these reasons (it runs much deeper than polls, but they are a good case study). That said, considering how many students make it to university without realising what a percentage actually is, I’m not sure if it makes much difference how these numbers are reported.
My guess is that enough sportspeople use the phrase “giving 110%” that a report claiming 110% of people agree with a position wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows (clearly, they just interviewed extra people for it!).
What do you mean? A spiral? Or just a pie chart with random numbers on it that don’t add up?
Old joke: When there are 3 people on the tramway, and 5 get off, then 2 have to get on again so that there’s nobody on anymore.
the pie chart of fail
ROTFLMAO!
I’ll try to go to bed. It’s a good question whether I’ll manage to actually fall asleep. :-D
Oh pshaw. Americans are interested in Canadian history. Many Americans know that Wayne Gretzky’s number 99 was retired by all NHL teams. We’re fully aware of the Toronto Blue Jays’ back-to-back World Series wins in 1992-93. And who can forget during the 1988 Calgary Olympic games Canada became the only host nation in Olympic history not to win a single gold medal? See, Americans do know about important events in Canadian history.
In my stats class in college we used USA Today as a prime example of how to lie with pie charts. That publication in particular has a penchant for making pies 3d and tilted, so that the wedge towards the back ends up looking smaller to make the perspective of a tilt regardless of its real proportion to the other wedges.
This, of course, is the best pie chart ever, followed closely by this one.
Or the hilariously ironic poll reported by Fox News that asked “Did scientist falsify research to support their own theories on Global Warming”. It added up to 120%.
I wonder if Jorge thinks his basic statistics course was responsible for improving his understanding of the flaws in polls.
http://xkcd.com/552/
This, of course, is the best pie chart ever,
:D I have to agree.
See how hospitable we are?
Consider this case:
A poll is conducted where the margin of error is 5% but 51% of respondents said yes while 49% of respondents said no. In addition 999 seperate polls are taken each with the same question and the same population and the same margin of error. Now you are given the first poll and are asked to predict whether yes is more common in the other 999 polls or no is more common.
If you don’t predict yes you are making the same mistake as this cartoon. Given the available evidence yes is more likely to be the majority answer in the other 999 polls. In other words poll results within the margin of error do provide information.
craig.mcgillivary #48
True, in your example there is a slight bias towards yes. However the cartoon didn’t say there was no information given when two (not 999) polls were taken and within the same margin of error. It said the polls weren’t news.
Amusing little comic. Need more (intentional) comedy here.
Just flying through, as http://www.pray4healing.com has a new poll up, and it hasn’t been pharyngulated yet.
The question is “Which miracle do you think Americans would most support?”
One of the options given is…
“PZ Myers publicly converts from atheism to follow the One True God”
OT
News I’m sure all Haitians will be absolutely thrilled to hear (as will you all I’m sure)is that neither the AiG missionary translator nor any of the recently translated AiG propagander materials were damaged by the earthquake.
Arrgh..
*propaganda*
didn’t quite catch the submission in time.
Joan Jett gets it right…in a different way. This stuff isn’t hard…unlike maths and statistics can be.
…over and over…just for fun… HA!
@ cafeeine #51
PZ is leading that poll by 4% over “Stephen Hawking finds his ALS is eliminated, enjoys health of the body.”
With currently only 200 total votes this poll makes a nice victim for click-by-pharynguation.
Does it even take “a basic statistics course” to come to this conclusion with regard to poll data?
No. :D
PZ is leading that poll by 4% over “Stephen Hawking finds his ALS is eliminated, enjoys health of the body.”
*shrug*
I voted for Hawking.
In other words poll results within the margin of error do provide information.
then you don’t understand standard deviations and statistics.
get ye hence to a statistics course.
…or think of a better example.
@ 51
On the internet
PZ Myers leads a poll
Water is wet, too
Finally, a truly worthy poll.
No kidding.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/2010/01/the_best_webcomic_its_time_to.html
Thanks for the Joan Jett link. I needed that!
Leading to this was the icing on the cake:
This needs to be on a t-shirt – Ill take 2 XL
Legion @21:
“Newscasts From the Past”. An entertaining series, even if it did repeat the long-discredited notion that medieval people used spices to disguise the taste of rotten meat and the “ring around the rosy” urban legend. One scene that has stood out in my memory had the announcer describing a wonderful technological innovation developed by builders at work on _____ Cathedral: “This new device, we are told, enables one man to do the work of two. They call it a ‘wheelbarrow’.”
Too bad I can only vote for the best one and not the best three.
“Which miracle do you think Americans would most support?”
I had to vote for the staring into the Sun one. This is the general, Faux News watching public we’re talking about, after all.
Cactus Wren:
Haw! Found it on YouTube. This episode is full of win: Newscast from the Past-1642
We find the debate on witchcraft, at 2:07, a depressingly relevant example of bad science and poor statistical comprehension.
The interview with Galileo at 4:28 hits a home run for science.
That was good. The obvious quibble is not all those events happened on that day (16-Oct-1642), with perhaps the most glaring examples being Galileo Galilei was already dead, having died in January of that year, and so could not have been interviewed the previous day; and William Shakespeare died years earlier, in 1616, not on that day. I assume some of the other events have also slightly moved in time?
But that’s all a quibble, it was certainly entertaining, full of win, and a very cleaver idea—and I assume a good teacher could use the time-shifting and other stuff to teach a number of lessons.
How in the name of Truth and Beauty is Jesus and Mo beating Schlock Mercenary? WEll, I guess plot and amusement often do rank below ideological comfort. Least xkcd seems to be doing pleasantly alright, as is Girl Genius.
News media are very good at making a story out of nothing. That’s what we get for having 24 hour news channels though right?
News media are very good at making a story out of nothing.
That’s their job isn’t it? It’s essential for terminally lazy editors and proprietors when flogging newsprint and advertising!
Major News outlets respond: “Whats a margin of error?”
Legion #21:
He appeared up a couple of weeks ago on Rachel Maddow’s show. He’s still around, but he’s more interested in educating adults than children right now. I think he decided to stay out of Texas, though, when he was booed at a lecture at one of our universities for stating the fact that the moon reflects light – contrary to the biblical version of the “facts”.
To: A Relevant Haiku…and totally off the subject.
This does not follow the normal structure of 17 moras.
After all it’s not a haiku, but a Hai-poo!
“Dad kept the bible in the toilet
I started to read it one day
It was begat,begat and begat as I shat.”
I believe that’s 29 moras…poetic license.
I remembered reading about Bill Nye’s wedding a few years ago and thinking it was strangely super-religious; just went looking for it and found this on Wikipedia, which makes me intensely curious for more info:
“Nye announced his engagement during an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and was married briefly to his fiancée of five months, Blair Tindall, author of Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, on February 3, 2006. The ceremony was performed by Rick Warren at The Entertainment Gathering and took place at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Yo-Yo Ma provided the music.[29] Tindall left the relationship seven weeks later when the marriage license was declared invalid; their impromptu ceremony that preceded the license purchase violated California state law, said Tindall in a radio interview.[30] “
craig.mcgillivary #48:
The fact that the results of a poll have predictability isn’t relevant to the conclusions that are drawn from the results. It’s just an interesting fact. Predictability is a function of probability, which is not the desired measurement of such polls. And even if you were interested in such a thing (because you are conducting scientific surveys and not non-scientific polls, you would still need a large enough difference between the data and the noise to be able to make a claim that the data are predictable.
Besides which, how many polls have you ever seen presented on the boob tube that ever told you what questions were asked, how many people were asked which questions, the order in which the questions were asked, how the data were collected, etc., etc, etc.? That’s even more important than the numbers themselves!
#48, again:
I also forgot to mention that you are begging the question with your example. If you conducted the study you suggest and then handed me the first poll, I would have no evidence by which to make the prediction you think I should. If I were privy to the results of the study, I wouldn’t be making a prediction at all.
No matter how I slice it, you have asked me to agree with you and be right, which is the best example of a confirmation bias I have ever seen. After all, what’s to say that when you did the 1000th pool the results wouldn’t suddenly shift the other direction? Would the results of your study then be invalid, or would you be willing to accept my “prediction”, whatever it may be?
“PZ is leading that poll by 4% over “Stephen Hawking finds his ALS is eliminated, enjoys health of the body.””
Nice to know that they care more about someone’s religious tribe affiliation than someone’s physical health.
I’d say the best comic strip I know is the now defunct 1/0. But Jesus and Mo is also excellent, and I voted for that.
TRiG.
Of course, they also know it’s hella more likely to change someone’s mind than to have a miracle that leaves actual physical evidence.
That’s freaking terrible. So between an actual miracle (That might provide evidence of God) that will vastly improve the quality of life of a guy who’s pretty much given his all for important work, and a conversion, they choose a conversion? I fucking hate religion-driven people.
And I hate Atheists too. Jesus and Mo is Mallard Fillmore repackaged for a new audience. If you must exhibit eye rolling bias, have the courtesy to at least provide something more then “Let’s laugh at people we don’t like” like Doonesbury’s sometimes-dry wit.
Ruttee, you’re not an atheist, then?
As an actuarist, I can say.
So.
Fucking.
True.
Irrelevant to judgment of her arguments.
An ad hominem argument.Weak.
More a rant then an actual argument.
Rorschach, ’twas a joke, though evidently a failed one.
Ah well.
Rutee: “And I hate Atheists too.”
Me: “… you’re not an atheist, then?”
LOL, sorry John, I’m evidently in “slow joke pickup mode”…:-)
I hate pretty much everything, including groups I belong to. For instance, I hate nerds because they’re traitors (Damn you Big Bang Theory writers!)
A comparison is not an ad hominem argument. An ad hominem argument would be “The writer (whoever it is) is a terrible person, therefore Jesus and Mo is bad.” What I did was compare one comic to another, and to my knowledge comparison doesn’t qualify as an ad hominem. If you want the longer version of why J and M is terrible, I’ll unpack what I meant by “Mallard Fillmore”.
J and M is a terrible webcomic because it has each of the following: A dopey premise, eye-rolling bias and the attendant strawman factory that come with it, terrible (Nee xeroxed) art, and non-jokes. Agreement with the bias and the message are necessary to get a laugh, and that laugh is based on “Haha, people I disagree with suck”, albeit for a specific form of disagreement.
Technically it says “Favorite”, so it’s a lot less irritating to see it polling well, but it remains Mallard Fillmore for a different audience.
Rutee, terrible art, unlike the high quality art styles of xkcd, Dilbert, and Pearls Before Swine?
I don’t recall if it was this or another early one I read, but there can be some difficulty for a modern reader. One of the phrases that gave me pause: “At the whim of the computer”. Buh? computers don’t have whims…ohhhhh.. “one who computes”, not computer.
True, but sometimes their behavior does approximate whims.
I’d argue PBS is stylized, as is Dilbert, because there appears to be less xeroxing between strips. It’s the difference between, say, Hagar the Horrible, or that rather amusing mockery of said xeroxing in Calvin and Hobbes, and what you generally end up with.
But hey, let’s accept that for a second. xkcd, Dilbert, and PBS make up for it with humor (PBS arguably, but I can appreciate puns and self deprecation), and writing, and aren’t dragged down by overwhelming obsession with their didactic message. I actually had a longer response and deleted it because I was dancing long enough on my soap box, but it boiled down to “With the exception of the straw man factory, none of those flaws individually can really ruin any given comic, but those flaws aren’t being taken individually here”.
What is the redeeming value of J and M supposed to be, exactly?
Rutee,
For me, it’s the satirical yet pithy and wry commentary on religiosity.
…In other words, the didactic message and “Haha! Religious people.” Again, even if you were a republican, that wouldn’t make Mallard Fillmore good.