Bad Statistics
goodmath | April 29, 2010 This past weekend, my friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece
of bad math. One of Orac's big interest is vaccination and
anti-vaccinationists. The piece is a newsletter by a group calling itself the "Sound Choice
Pharmaceutical Institute" (SCPI), which purports to show a link
between vaccinations and autism. But instead of the usual anti-vac rubbish about
thimerosol, they claim that "residual human DNA contamintants from aborted human fetal cells"
causes autism.
Among others, Orac already covered the nonsense
of that from a biological/medical
perspective. What he didn't do, and…
goodmath | November 17, 2009 I've been writing this blog for a long time - nearly four years. You'd think that
after all of the bad math I've written about, I must have reached the point where
I wouldn't be surprised at the sheer innumeracy of most people - even most supposedly
educated people. But alas for me, I'm a hopeless idealist. I just never quite
manage to absorb how clueless the average person is.
Today in the New York Times, there's an editorial which talks about
the difficulties faced by the children of immigrants. In the course of
their argument, they describe what they claim is the difference between
the…
goodmath | August 11, 2009 Here's a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link
to the same story via CNN. It's yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.
Here's the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It's
a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you're home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get…
goodmath | July 28, 2009 An alert reader just sent me, via "Media Matters", the single dumbest real-life
video clip that I have ever seen. In case you've been living under a rock, Bill O'Reilly is
a conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He's known for doing a lot of really obnoxious
things, ranging from sexually harassing at least one female employee, to sending some of
his employees to stalk people who he doesn't like, to shutting off the microphones of
guests on his show if he's losing an argument. In short, he's a loudmouthed asshole who
gets off on bullying people.
But that's just background. As a…
goodmath | April 6, 2009Yet More Deceptive Graphs
As you've probably heard, there was a horrible incident in Pittsburgh this weekend, in
which a crazed white supremacist who believed that Obama was coming to take his guns shot and
killed three policemen. Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos, pointed out lunatics like this shooter
are acting on conspiracy theories that are being relentlessly promoted by the likes of Glen
Beck and Michelle Bachman. It's not an unreasonable thing to point out, given the amount of
time that Beck and Bachman have spent lately talking about the impending socialist/fascist
crackdowns that will…
goodmath | February 16, 2009 I wasn't going to write about this, because I really don't have much to add. But people keep mailing it to me, so in order to shut you all up, I'll chip in.
As everyone knows by now, we're in the midst of a really horrible
financial disaster. I've argued in the past on this blog that the root cause of the entire disaster is pure, simple stupidity on the part of people in the financial business. People gave out mortgages that any
sane rational person would have considered ridiculous. And then they built huge, elaborate financial structures on top of those mortgages, pretending that by…
goodmath | February 9, 2009 I'm behind the curve a bit here, but I've seen and heard a bunch of
people making really sleazy arguments about the current financial stimulus
package working its way through congress, and those arguments are a perfect
example of one of the classic ways of abusing statistics. I keep mentioning metric errors - this is another kind of metric error. The difference between this and some of the other examples that I've shown is that this is deliberately dishonest - that is, instead of accidentally using the wrong metric to get a wrong answer, in this case, we've got someone deliberately taking…
goodmath | May 6, 2008 One of the most common sleazy tricks used by various sorts of denialists
comes back to statistics - invalid and deceptive sampling methods. In fact,
the very first real post on the original version of this blog was a shredding of
a paper by Mark and David Geier that did this.
Proper statistical analysis relies on a kind of blindness. Many of the things
that you look for, you need to look for in a way that doesn't rely on any a priori
knowledge of the data. If you look at the data, and find what appears to be an
interesting property of it, you have to be very careful to show that it's
a real…
goodmath | February 28, 2008 Yet another reader sent me a link to a really annoying article at a site called "Daily Tech". The article has been more than adequately debunked by Darksyde at Daily Kos, but it's a very typical example of a general kind of argument made both for and against global warming, which I find extremely annoying.
The basic argument takes one of two forms:
Wow, look how hot it is today! How can anyone possible deny global
warming?
Wow, look how cold it is today! How can those idiots believe in global
warming?
These are both examples of confusing weather with climate. That confusion is a…
goodmath | February 11, 2008 I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking for my take on
the news about the Washington GOP primary. Most have wanted me to
debunk rumours about vote fixing there, the way that I tried to debunk the
rumours about the Democratic votes back in New Hampshire.
Well, sorry to disappoint those of you who were hoping for a nice debunking
of the idea of fraud, but to me, something sure looks fishy.
For those who haven't been following: over the weekend,
Republicans had primaries and/or caucuus in three states. In the first
two - Kansas and Louisiana - McCain got beaten, badly, by Mike…
goodmath | October 25, 2007 My friend, fellow ScienceBlogger, and BlogFather Orac asked me to take a look at
href="http://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/carroll.pdf">a paper that purportedly shows that abortion is a
causative risk factor for breast cancer, which he
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/10/abortion_and_breast_cancer_the_chicago_t.php">posted about
this morning. When the person who motivated me to start what's turned out to be a shockingly
successful blog asks for something, how could I possibly say no? Especially when it's such a great example
of the misuse of mathematics for political purposes…