The tyranny of statistics (and algorithms, too): Mark Twain said there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”, but it could just as easily be said that there are facts, damned facts, and statistics—sometimes all three at once.
I recently visited with Ewing High School’s creative writing and journalism classes, and particularly in the latter, we talked about the ways that certain information and statistics, while factual in the strictest sense, can be manipulated or misleadingly presented to steer the reader’s opinion one way or another.
