Afsnitsforfatter: Danielle J. Navarro and David R. Foxcroft

Statistics in everyday life

“We are drowning in information,

* but we are starved for knowledge”*

—Various authors, original probably John Naisbitt

When I started writing up my lecture notes I took the 20 most recent news articles posted to the ABC news website. Of those articles, eight involved a discussion of something that I would call a statistical topic and six of those made a mistake. The most common error was failing to report baseline data (e.g., the article mentions that 5% of people in situation X have some characteristic Y, but does not say how common the characteristic is for everyone else!). The point I am trying to make here is not that journalists are bad at statistics (though they almost always are), it is that a basic knowledge of statistics is very helpful for trying to figure out when someone else is either making a mistake or even lying to you. In fact, one of the biggest things that a knowledge of statistics does to you is cause you to get angry at the newspaper or the internet on a far more frequent basis. You can find a good example of this in the section A real-life example.