From the course: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
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Avoiding data manipulation
From the course: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Avoiding data manipulation
- You have likely heard the famous Mark Twain quote, "Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable." When I teach students how to be more persuasive in their presentations, I spend a lot of time on how to present data and how to use statistics and all the ways that data can be manipulated to say what you want it to say. In this lesson, I'll point out a few common data manipulation methods so that you can keep an eye out for them and know how to look past them. The first is related to false causation, but it goes one step further by using charts to show how two things correlate over time. You're likely to see right through my claim that increases in Nicholas Cage movies cause more accidents in home pools, but the correlation's there. Since 1999, these two statistics have moved really closely. Coincidence? Sure. Causation? Highly unlikely. Another common statistics, manipulation, is to visualize data using a…
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