Trusting statistics
I had a Facebook discussion yesterday about statistics. At one point, my interlocutor posted "You should know better than anyone that statistics can be manipulated to actually show the opposite of what is real." Well, just to be clear, that's not a problem with statistics, that's a problem of motivated reasoning, which is not a statistical algorithm. The topic of our discussion was economics, and he says he trusts Krugman on economics. Krugman, of course, uses statistics to draw his conclusion. He's a Nobel Laureate, but the Nobel Prize in Economics is notoriously political. Here's a little lesson is substituting argument from authority for argument from evidence. Ronald A. Fisher is widely considered to be the founder of modern statistics. There's no question that our understanding of the world owes a significant debt to Fisher and his statistical innovations. But Fisher was quite vocal in questioning the association of smoking with cancer, which is based...