Article created by: Monika Pašukonytė
Statistics is an interesting branch of science that has often got a bad rap. It teaches us a lot about the world and helps us quantify things really well. Statistics also helps with planning, forecasting, and understanding different facts.
Although it provides many unique insights, people tend to spout numbers without truly understanding the context behind them. These misinterpreted stats can put you on the wrong path completely and change the narrative of a story. Which is exactly what you’ll find in the examples shared in this list.
That the average lifespan a few hundred years ago was close to 40. That's heavily skewed by child mortality, and if you made it to 10, you were probably going to make it at least to 60.
You're most likely to get in an accident near your home.
Well, obviously that's where statistically most likely to be in terms of frequency. I wonder what the stats would be after adjusting for that.
Election maps where 90% of the state is colored by one party to include vast areas of wilderness and unpopulated regions to skew the perception that their party is much more popular than the other, while conveniently ignoring the fact that most people live in densely populated areas.
I've heard a "certain segment" of people who like to cite crime statistics say "there are more black men in prison than in college."
You're comparing approximately a range of 4 to 5 years (college) to a life time (prison).
The number of “border encounters”. It gets touted by the media all the time and people treat it like a measure of illegal border crossings but it’s not.
For one thing, if you drop enforcement to zero, border encounters go to zero too while crossings go up. Similarly, if you have more effective enforcement, the number of encounters goes up.
For another, researchers found that about half of all border encounters were with people who had attempted to cross before and were sent back. So it’s reflective of the number of tries more than the number of people.
Then there’s the fact that it counts asylum seekers, who are crossing entirely legally. In fact, the recent spike in border crossings is largely due to a spike in asylum seekers.
But people treat it like the number itself means something, especially the change in it, but it’s a measure of a combination of things and you can’t draw conclusions about any one of them from that number alone.
Population density. 99% of "OMG LOOK AT THIS MAP AND LOOK WHERE ALL THE BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING" hot takes are just maps of "Where most people live.".
That women almost always get the kids in divorce
This is true, but that’s because 90% of child custody cases are settled on outside of court, meaning the fathers aren’t actually fighting for custody of the kids. When they do they usually do get joint custody so long as the father is a fit parent.
I’m doing X fad diet (keto, vegan, carnivore, extended fasting, omad, etc) and lost Y lbs in only Z weeks! 🥰🥰🥰
Half of it was water/muscle/poop, soon enough you’re going straight back to your old habits.
They always get mean mistaken for median.
More people die from drowning after eating ice cream.
Context is that most people eat ice cream near the sea or at pools on holiday.
“Tons of people heard Kitty Genovese being killed but nobody called 911”
Yeah, because 911 didn’t exist in 1964.
The statistic about you being attacked by a shark in the United States. A lot of times they'll just use the entire population of the country. I'm sorry but if you're in Kansas it's functionally zero percent vs an active surfer/swimmer in the ocean on the coast.
That one about we using only a fraction of our brain.
Just about any headline that states "if you eat X you are twice as likely to die from Y." The context is that Y is usually a rare condition such that the case rate goes from 3/100,000 to 6/100,000 people. Yeah, it doubled but so what? The odds are in your favor so if X is your fav food go ahead and enjoy it.
The people who throw out that black individuals are statistically more likely to commit crimes. That may be the case looking at pure numbers, but they also never recognize that the locations these happen in have extremely poor standards of living. Low income necessitates crime, and people know that, yet they gleefully push people into these situations so they can have more for their stats.
You used to see a ton of this from climate deniers - "There has been no warming in the last X years". Where X is however many years it was since 1997, which was an unseasonably warm El Nino year. The trend has been warmer and warmer for decades, but for a long time after 1997 the trend sort of looked flat if you only went back to this one outlier. We might see more of this starting from 2024.
The current inflation of the U.S, usually disregarding the fact that it's worldwide.
That 15 minutes might save you 15% or more on car insurance.
You’re part of only the less than 1% that serve in the military. Usually told in speeches at basic training and academy graduations.
That number is true if you look at currently serving vs. total population. But if you consider everyone alive who HAS served in that number, it’s around 7%. If you consider the number of kids who will eventually serve, it’s over 10%. Then if you factor in the number who would choose to but aren’t eligible, the number that would have but couldn’t in the past due to discrimination, it’s probably much higher than that.
But the 1% number gets spouted a lot so veterans get to feel extra special.
(US based statistics only).
Just remember
‘Liars can figure, figures can lie’
Think around the stats.
The gender pay gap doesn’t take into account hours worked, or different kinds of work. More women just work part time.
When you compare salaries between men and women without children, the difference drops to 3%. Not perfect, but nowhere near the amount people think it is.
