A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (33 page)

average investor does not earn the average return
:
A simulation, see Tabarrok, A. (2014, July 11). Average stock market returns aren’t average. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/07/average-stock-market-returns-arent-average.html. Accessed October 14, 2014.

poster presented at a conference by a student researcher
:
Tully, L. M., Lincoln, S. H., Wright, T., & Hooker, C. I. (2013). Neural mechanisms supporting the cognitive control of emotional information in schizophrenia. Poster presented at the 25th Annual Meeting of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266159520_Neural_mechanisms_supporting_the_cognitive_control_of_emotional_information_in_schizophrenia.

I first found this example at www.betterposters.blogspot.com.

gross sales of a publishing company
:
http://pelgranepress.com/index.php/tag/biz/.

Fox News broadcast the following graph
:
I’ve redrawn this for the sake of clarity. For the original, see http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/fbn-cavuto-20120731-bushexpire.jpg.

Discontinuity in vertical or horizontal axis
:
Spirer, Spirer, & Jaffe, op. cit., pp. 82–84.

Choosing the proper scale and axis
:
Example from Spirer, Spirer, & Jaffe, op. cit., p. 78.

Many things change at a constant rate
:
Spirer, Spirer, & Jaffe, op. cit., p. 78.

life expectancy of smokers versus nonsmokers at age twenty-five
:
These data taken from Jha, P., et al. (2013). 21st-century hazards of smoking and benefits of cessation in the United States.
New England Journal of Medicine
,
368
(4), 341–350, Figure 2A for women. Survival probabilities were scaled from the National Health Interview Survey to the U.S. rates of death from all causes at these ages for 2004 with adjustment for differences in age, educational level, alcohol consumption, and adiposity (body-mass index). I’m grateful to Prabhat Jha for her correspondence about interpreting this.

This form of presentation is based on that of Wainer, H. (1997).
Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot.
New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag.

expenditures per public school student and those students’ scores on the SAT
:
This example from Wainer, H. (1997).
Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot.
New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, p. 93. The original appeared in
Forbes
(May 14, 1990).

Of course, there are other variables. Are the spending increases reported in actual or inflation-adjusted dollars? Was the time frame 1980–88 chosen to make that point, and would a different time frame make a different point?

The correlation also provides a good estimate
:
There is some controversy about whether to use
r
or
r-squared
. For the defense of
r
, see: D’Andrade, R., & Dart, J. (1990). The interpretation of r versus r
²
or why percent of variance accounted for is a poor measure of size of effect.
Journal of Quantitative Anthropology,
2, 47–59.

Ozer, D. J. (1985). Correlation and the coefficient of determination.
Psychological Bulletin, 97
(2), 307–315.

services provided by the organization Planned Parenthood
:
Roth, Z. (2015, Sept. 29). Congressman uses misleading graph to smear Planned Parenthood. msnbc.com.

Politifact explored this issue further, examining the data between the endpoints and furnishing additional contextual information to go along with the usual graph-centered criticism. See https://perma.cc/P8NY-YP49.

presentation on iPhone sales
:
http://qz.com/122921/the-chart-tim-cook-doesnt-want-you-to-see/; http://www.tekrevue.com/tim-cook-trying-prove-meaningless-chart/.

feature spurious co-occurrences
:
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations.

Randall Munroe in his Internet cartoon
xkcd
:
https://xkcd.com/552/.

visual system is pitted against your logical system
:
This example is based on one in Huff, ibid.

Any model of consumer behavior on a website
:
This is nearly a direct quote from De Veaux, R. D., & Hand, D. J. (2005). How to lie with bad data.
Statistical Science, 20
(3), 231–238, p. 232.

Colgate’s biggest competitor was named nearly as often
:
I thank my student Vivian Gu for this example.

Derbyshire, D. (2007, Jan. 17). Colgate gets the brush off for “misleading” ads.
The Telegraph.
Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1539715/Colgate-gets-the-brush-off-for-misleading-ads.html.

C-SPAN advertises that it is “available
”:
http://www.c-span.org/about/history/.

doesn’t mean that even one person is watching
:
Nielsen reports that Americans, on average, receive 189 channels but watch only 17 of them. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2014/changing-channels-americans-view-just-17-channels-despite-record-number-to-choose-from.html.

water use in the city of Rancho Santa Fe
:
Boxall, B. (2014, Dec. 2). Rancho Santa Fe ranked as state’s largest residential water hog.
Los Angeles Times
. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-water-rancho-20141202-story.html.

Lovett, I. (2014, Nov. 29). “Where grass is greener, a push to share drought’s burden.”
New York Times
. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/us/where-grass-is-greener-a-push-to-share-droughts-burden.html.

flying is actually safer now
:
http://www.flightsafety.org; Grant, K. B. (2014, Dec. 30). Deadly year for flying—but safer than ever. http://www.cnbc.com/id/102301598.

Newton’s law of cooling
:
For an initial temperature of 155 degrees Fahrenheit, the formula is

f
(
t
) = 80
e
−0.08
^t
+ 75.

C-SPAN is available in 100 million homes
:
Bedard, P. (2010, June 22). “Brian Lamb: C-SPAN now reaches 100 million homes.”
U.S. News & World Report
. www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2010/06/22/brian-lamb-c-span-now-reaches-100-million-homes. Retrieved November 22, 2010.

90 percent of the population is within twenty-five miles
:
Based on Huff, op. cit., p. 48.

3,482 active-duty U.S. military personnel who died in 2010
:
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/Files/113th-congress-2013-2014/workingpaper/49837-Casualties_WorkingPaper-2014-08.pdf.

total of 1,431,000 people in the military
:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0511.pdf.

death rate in 2010
:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm.

general population of the United States includes
:
Based on an example from Huff, op. cit., p. 83.

increase in the number of doctors
:
I thank my student Alexandra Ghelerter for this example. Barnett, A. (1994). How numbers are tricking you. Retrieved from http://www.sandiego.edu/statpage/barnett.htm.

nuances often tell a story
:
This is Best’s term.

there are
six
different indexes
:
Davidson, A. (2015, July 1). The economy’s missing metrics.
New York Times
Magazine
.

July 2015 that the unemployment rate dropped
:
Shell, A. (2015, July 2). Wall Street weighs Fed’s next move after jobs data.
USA Today Money
. http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/07/02/wall-street-gets-what-it-wants-in-june-jobs-count/.

reported the reason for the apparent drop
:
Schwartz, N. D. (2015, July 3). Jobless rate fell in June, with wages staying flat.
New York Times
, B1.

batting averages for the 2015 season
:
Stats from http://mlb.mlb.com/stats/sortable.jsp#elem=[object+Object]&tab_level=child&click_text=Sortable+Player+hitting&game_type=%27R%27&season=2015&season_type=ANY &league_code=%27MLB%27§ionType=sp&statType=hitting&page=1&ts=1457286793822&playerType=QUALIFIER&timeframe=.

top three causes of death in 2013
:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm.

attitudes do not seem to fall upon racial lines
:
This is entirely hypothetical.

Another hurdle: You want age variability
:
This is from Huff, op. cit., p. 22.

71 percent of
which
British?
:
Ibid.

answer falsely just to shock the pollster
:
Many years ago, Chicago columnist Mike Royko encouraged readers to lie to exit pollers on Election Day in the hope that inaccurate data and being made to look foolish would end the practice of TV commentators calling the result of an election before all the votes were counted. I have no data on how many people lied to the exit pollers because of Royko’s column, but the fact that exit polls are still a thing suggests it wasn’t enough.

the price you pay for not hearing from everyone
:
Taken from http://www.aapor.org/AAPORKentico/Education-Resources/For-Researchers/Poll-Survey-FAQ/What-is-the-Margin-of-Sampling-Error.aspx.

Note that these ranges overlap
:
This is a good rule of thumb, but in some cases this quick method will be inaccurate. See Schenker, N., & Gentleman, J. F. (2001). On judging the significance of differences by examining the overlap between confidence intervals.
American Statistician
,
55
(3), 182–186.

Five times out of a hundred
:
I’m intentionally not making a distinction here between frequentist and Bayesian probability estimates, a distinction that comes up in Part Two.

Margin of error
:
(image) From Wikipedia.

formula for calculating the margin of error
:
For large populations, the 95 percent confidence interval can be estimated as ±1.96 × sqrt [p(1-p)/n]. To obtain a 99 percent confidence interval, multiply by 2.58 instead of 1.96. Yes, the interval is
larger
when you’re more confident (which should make sense; if you want to be more sure that the range you quote includes the true value, you need a larger range). For smaller populations, the formula is to first compute the standard error: