Cathy, do the math.
Cathy, do the math.
298 评论
-
I love how one person cites a statistic, and another person just dismisses it as false because of their anecdotal experience.
-
Sounds like every online platform ever.
-
False! Source: my ass
-
-
That's good. I'm taking it haha
-
-
It was more like False, Source: this paper that says True.
-
Cite it
-
False! Source: (my ass, 2025, jerboa for lemmy)
Is that acceptable?
-
-
-
Actually, that's not true at all. This one time, I met a guy who...
-
-
This is how most people think and see the world, which is why we (the US) are in the boat we're in now. People don't see the big picture if they never have to or aren't taught how to think critically.
-
I think it's a complicated problem. To start with, the studies are usually paywalled. If you can afford to purchase access, you still need the capacity to understand and parse the formal academic language. Most people have neither of those requirements, and have to rely on the media to report the statistics accurately, which doesn't happen.
This leads to a situation where the media keeps trying to say, idk employment statistics are better than ever, and then everybody updates their mental blocklist to filter out the word 'statistics'.
-
Not to mention most issues are extremely nuanced and complex, not something that can be accurately broken down into 5 second sound bits.
-
That was the whole point of the media before it became entertainment
-
-
Almost as of by design of corporate overlords and billionaires. Almost as of billions of dollars and collective hate can't fill the emptiness. Almost as if we should focus on healing everyone's (including billionaires ')wounded inner child schisms and social divides may start healing. Maybe
-
-
And I've never heard of a contract that explicitly ties non-union workers' pay to the union contact, but I'd be cheering the union guys on if they ever asked for a raise if that was the case.
-
That's actually more common than you think. It's not explicit.
My niece who works at a very popular coffee shop where some are unioned, the non-union ones get paid a bit extra and reminded on the daily about that benefit of higher pay for being non-unioned.
And my aunt works as a receptionist in a non-union hospital. Her counterparts in a union, when they went on strike and got a huge pay bump... She suddenly "mysteriously" got a pay bump aligned with it because the non-union hospital was afraid of employees unionizing (which secretly, they were).
-
It's in the news that Starbucks does that
-
-
-
If these people were good at critical thinking, they wouldn't have these stupid fucking opinions to begin with.
-
My thoughts exactly. And how I love this complete dismissal style with the "False." at the beginning, that has established itself online. it's a perfect giveaway for " now my personal but universal opinion, also called Truth bomb, is going to destroy your statement" - which in my opinion is just extremely patronizing and never really true.
Especially when comparing your personal anecdotal experience with a fucking statistic.
Oh and nobody talks like that in real life, or at least the people that do start their verbal line of argument this way are idiots and everybody knows it.
-
False. Bears eat beets. Bears. Beats. Battlestar galactica.
-
-
Part of the problem is that statistics can be abused. It takes a reasonable amount of training to be able to differentiate between reliable statistics and potentially dodgy. Even worse, we are often presented with them, striped or context.
The best solution is to teach people how to both spot problems and seek reliable data. The proper meaning of "do your own research". Unfortunately, a significant chunk just give up with them and only trust their gut.
-
statistics can be abused
They can be abused, by people who understand statistics talking to people who don't understand statistics. This is a good reason to learn statistical methods rather than reject them.
-
There are levels of abuse, some blatant, some subtle. Leading questions are obvious, when you have the question asked. Publishing bias is difficult to spot, even for trained scientists looking for it.
Learning about statistical methods isn't enough. People need to be taught how to weigh the data presented against the value of misleading them.
It's a subsection of logical reasoning, and needs to be taught as part of an integrated whole.
-
I think statistically (pun intended) there are more problems with people ignoring statistics or plain lying, than statistics being abused
-
Even a small amount of statistic abuse will break blind trust in them. Once that trust is gone, some people will reject all of them, rather than try and differentiate.
Low grade abuse of statistics and related methods is rampant in low grade media.
-
But blind trust in everything else never breaks?
-
In reality, statistics should be trusted based on source, method and importance.
A survey of preferred ice-cream flavours by an ice-cream company can be trusted easily, even if the wording and method are a bit loose. An analysis of a potentially billion dollar drug requires FAR more scrutiny, even from multiple reliable sources. Between these 2 extremes is a spectrum of trust.
Unfortunately, most people don't do well with shades of grey. If some statistics can't be trusted, then none can. It's all false news (until it happens to agree with their preconceived views).
-
But my point is, why does that "all or nothing" standard apply to statistics, but not to news channels, newspapers, internet articles, etc.
-
Because statistics is a relative unknown to many people. Until people have a good grounding in statistics then they often have to rely on an appeal to authority.
-
-
-
-
-
A bit of healthy scientific skepticism or logical reasoning with some skills to evaluate sources of evidence and biases help with both understanding quoted stats, and liars and the ill-informed.
It's a difficult and time consuming skill to learn and use though.
-
-
-
-
Typically, statistics are abused by politicians/partisan hacks who take data from reliable sources and lie/spin it to their narrative. The thing is, the average Fox News viewer with a HS diploma isn't going to dig any deeper. And I wouldn't say they trust their gut... they trust the propaganda narrative.
When Trump and Vance said immigrants were eating people's dogs and cats, they just nodded their empty heads.. you can't teach someone like that to engage reason.
-
I dont know, when most people were children they might believe their parents like that. Some of them grow up and develop minds of their own and critical thinking but others seem not to. Maybe it gets harder to grow up, the longer you spend as a child.
Or maybe you're right and it's an intrinsic part of human diversity - maybe the tribe has always needed some sheeple - so our genes might always create some.
-
-
-
298 评论