There are reports that aerosol sprays kill the ozone and sugar substitutes cause cancer. With all of the studies I've heard over the past few years, I am pretty sure that living causes death. Cause and effect. Stuff happens.
Some people use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post - for support rather than for illumination.
Before everyone starts bombarding my inbox with the what does this have to do with SUVs and Offroad?", consider the following. There's not a day that goes by that someone isn't trying to prove that SUVs are unsafe to not only ourselves but also to fellow drivers, environmentally unfriendly or that SUV drivers are affluent, rude, arrogant and don't care about others.Offroaders know that they're not exempt from these attacks. Statisticians and reporters show that they ruin pristine woodlands, kill the habitat of the rare frog of the month and generally litter up areas, ruining it for others. On average (and you know how I feel about averages) there's a bit of reality sprinkled over the whole truth. In other words, you've got to look at the entire picture and ask more questions.
Statistics are like a bikini.
What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
How many times have you seen stats used to prove that SUV drivers are more likely to die in a rollover accident than a car driver who rolls his ride. Or those "big heavy SUVs are killing everyone in crashes - lighter weight vehicles are safer. Stats back up the claim, right? Hands down, end of story? According the an NHTSA report"the lighter LTVs, the heavier cars, and especially the lighter cars – fatality rates increased as weights decreased."
Webster defines statistics as: a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data. Special attention should be paid to the interpretation of the numerical data. Unlike an editorial (which this article is, it's my opinion), statistical analyses are often taken as fact, or scientific proof. Fact is, it's one person's interpretation that can be swayed by something as simple as not reviewing all the possible causes or something as malicious as funding of the study by extreme activists.
Is the solution to the problem of bad statistics to ignore all statistics? Should we assume that every number is false? While some statistics are bad, others are pretty good, and we need statistics--good statistics--to talk sensibly about issues. The solution, then, is not to give up on statistics, but to become better judges of the numbers we encounter. We need to think critically about statistics. But, hey.... that's just my opinion, what's yours?