Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (Score 1)

If someone is going to bring up the issue of how to abuse statistics to make a point, I thought I'd add the following. (I actually make my living as a statistician - sorry about that). On the topic of putting in keywords into the a search on AltaVista, Statistics come up in 9,692,788 webpages, Facts come up in 4,352,390, Lies come up in 1,197,980, and Damn Lies come up in only 1,445. Wow, how about that. That means that there are more than 11 times more facts and statistics on the web than there are lies and damn lies. Woowee! Now, if I wanted to be nice I'd stop there, but I'm in a particularly onery mood so I'll add to the pain by letting you know that I did the same searches on Yahoo, MSN (sorry, but it is out there), Webcrawler, and Infoseek. Assuming that there is overlap between the search engines (hey, they can't all have the same 10% of the web covered can they?) I took the average values and arrived at the following, Statistics: 2,899,230; Facts: 1,809,899; Lies: 559,362; and Damn Lies: 1081. Guess what! We still have more facts and statistics than we do lies and damn lies on the web. God bless the goodness of the web. I could be really annoying and give you the tests of means that I performed to check for statistical significance, but I think I'm pushing it as it is. And just remember, I did this for the good of my own profession.


"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."