Scrabble with Statistics

Scrabble with Statistics 

Statistics are like Scrabble tiles. If you have enough of them you can arrange them to say just about anything you want.

Not only are numbers meaningless without ideas and words that attach them to things, but they are easily manipulated. Actually it is the ideas and words that numbers are attach to, and those ideas and words cover over things. Numbers do not have a direct connection or relationship to things. You can't attach numbers to things that are not defined and labeled, and as a result numbers are at the whim of the ideas and words that we create. Numbers on their own mean nothing, numbers that have any meaning have that meaning because of the words and ideas that we as humans create and arrange.

There are many books on the subject, about how to lie with statistics and that raw data is not at all raw. I have never read any of them from cover to cover, but I have browsed through a few and read some reviews. There is nothing there that someone well versed in philosophy (or the philosophic musings of major physicist from the middle of last century) doesn't already know. Numbers themselves are not authoritative or objective, they rely on ideas and words which are always open to interpretation and manipulation.

You can take numbers and make them say anything you want if you are willing to reinterpret or outright manipulate the relationship they have to things by reworking, hiding or misrepresenting the words and ideas that make the numbers meaningful. This is one of the ways that Nietzsche's saying, 'there are no facts only interpretation' is true.