Alec Zimmer
Columnist

Okay, so maybe I’m slightly over exaggerating, but it’s still interesting how often statistics are conjured up with people blindly accepting them.

Here’s a scenario: you pick up a magazine with the following story: “New Study Demonstrates People Who Eat Peanut Butter Are 50% Less Likely To Develop Cancer”. Interesting, but often we’re not told how much peanut butter is needed to decrease the risk of cancer. It might just be a dab of peanut butter – but could also be half a cup of peanut butter. While there might be a few brave souls willing to try the latter, I doubt that this study would be useful to most people in any case (This is all hypothetical by the way – you don’t have to start shoveling down spoonfuls of peanut butter because of this article.)

The use of polls taken for political races is another example that quickly comes to mind for me (maybe I’ve been spending too much time in debate?). A recent USA Today/Gallup Poll shows McCain leading Obama by 50%-46% +/-3%. Most people have no clue what that 3% means – is there a 50/50 chance that the actual support is within 3% of the estimated value? Or does it mean that the actual support is definitely within 3% of the number? Many people don’t even know what that 50-46% means.

It seems odd that numbers are the most precise way to describe things, yet we know so little about how they’re used in real life. People almost never explain things using numbers, but when they do, a clarification is often necessary. People aren’t even sure what to think when they hear a string of numbers cited in a conversation or an article. And even those few who can overcome their initial shock are often unable to process this information.

All this gives me an idea as to why statistics are commonly used. Most people don’t know what someone’s talking about if they start listing off a set of numbers and don’t bother putting in the effort to understand what those numbers mean. Who would? But that’s precisely the problem with statistics.

Unfortunately, the majority of people don’t take a statistics course, and even fewer remember everything they learned from the class. This means people are generally unquestioning of statistics and this makes creating false numbers the easiest and quickest way to impress others with one’s seemingly vast knowledge.

But beyond that, statistics can be used to mislead people. Suppose you open the newspaper one morning and are confronted with the headline: “Exploding Elbow Syndrome Is the Fastest Growing Disease In America” (again, this is all hypothetical).

Before you begin sending donations to the “Exploding Elbow Research Center”, consider this: that statement could be 100% true yet still totally misleading. How? If there was one case of “exploding elbow syndrome” in 2006 and two cases in 2007, the number of cases have doubled per year.

Unfortunately, statistics like that can be manipulated to encourage support for bad policymaking as Joel Best points out in his book Damned Lies and Statistics. But how to resolve this issue? It’s difficult to say what could be done, but perhaps offering statistics as a more mainstream class instead of solely as an AP class and emphasizing the practical nature of the class could help
resolve these issues, at least for South students.

Phil Gartner, math department instructional supervisor, said, “[The class is only offered as an AP because]…there is a lot of statistics and work with data integrated throughout the G and regular curriculum.”

He also mentioned that the AP Statistics course is available to students of all academic levels. Given this, students should take initiative of their own understanding of statistics by taking AP Statistics sometime during their high school careers. The alternative to this course would be the class Decision Making With Data, which incorpates statistics and will be available next year. Rise up to to the challenge South!