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Telling the Truth About Damned Lies and Statistics

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Telling the truth about Damned Lies and Statistics
The author made clear that most of the American people are not-so-math-literate. When a regular American is shown eye catching graphs and percentages they would believe it, without even knowing the consistency of the statistics. It wouldn’t be improbable to believe without any developed mathematical skills that a regular American is unable to estimate or even tell, the stability of any given statistics. Joel Best is saying that the society is gullible and has lack of judgment when it comes to statistics and he’s not to prove the incapability of the education system. In this article, the author, Joel Best is talks about how society is continuously fed by hyperboles and how they only pay attention to the numbers and not the context. For example, the statement "Brand X is 84% fat-free" sounds good until you realize that this means the food product is 16% fat by weight. Also, "fastest growing" could mean that there used to be one customer and then there were five more, making a five-hundred percent increase. The media runs on the society’s credulity using statistics to bolster their weak arguments. For example, in advertisements saying a product is the fastest growing, but specifically compared to what or when.

Isn’t it that numbers are supposed to represent ”objective scientific data” which we can’t deny because it has been studied by experienced experts. But some people like dirty business mans who would lie and would want to make his argument undeniably scientific so they use magic numbers to trick those people in the society who lacks optimal knowledge on basic mathematics into believing to what they’re selling. So they say that statistics doesn’t lie, that may be true, but liars use statistics.
But to be honest, who has time to question or verify every single graph or numbers and information that are

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