What would be some fact that, while true, could be told in a context or way that is misinfomating or make the other person draw incorrect conclusions?

  • @erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
    18•1 year ago

    When you think about data it actually gets really scary really quick. I have a Master’s in Data Analytics.

    First, data is “collected.”

    • So, a natural question is “Who are they collecting data from?”

    • Typically it’s a sample of a population - meant to be representative of that population, which is nice and all.

    • But if you dig deeper you have to ask “Who is taking time out of their day to answer questions?” “How are they asked?” “Why haven’t I ever been asked?” “Would I even want to give up my time to respond to a question from a stranger?”

    • So then who is being asked? And perhaps more importantly, who has time to answer?

    • Spoiler alert: typically it’s people who think their opinions are very important. Do you know people like that? Would you trust the things they claim are facts?

    • Do the data collectors know what demographic an answer represents? An important part of data collection is anonymity - knowing certain things about the answerer could skew the data.

    • Are you being represented in the “data”? Would you even know if you were or weren’t?

    • And what happens if respondents lie? Would the data collector have any idea?

    And that’s just collecting the data, the first step in the process of collecting data, extracting information, and creating knowledge.

    Next is “cleaning” the data.

    • When data is collected it’s messy.

    • There are some data points that are just deleted. For instance, something considered an outlier. And they have an equation for this, and this equation as well as the outliers it identifies should be analyzed constantly. Are they?

    • How is the data being cleaned? How much will it change the answers?

    • Between what systems is the data transferred? Are they state-of-the-art or some legacy system that no one currently alive understands?

    • Do the people analyzing the data know how this works?

    So then, after the data is put through many unknown processes, you’re left with a set of data to analyze.

    • How is it being analyzed? Is the analyzer creating the methodology for analysis for every new set of data or are they running it through a system that someone else built eons ago?

    • How often are these models audited? You’d need a group of people that understand the code as well as the data as well as the model as well as the transitional nature of the data.

    Then you have outside forces, and this might be scariest of all.

    • The best way to describe this is to tell a story: In the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the top candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. There was a lot of tension, but basically everyone on the left could not fathom people voting for Trump. (In 2023 this seems outrageous, but it was a real blind spot at the time).

    • All media outlets were predicting a landslide victory for Clinton. But then, as we all know I’m sure, the unbelievable happened: Trump won the electoral college. Why didn’t the data predict that?

    • It turns out one big element was purposeful skewing of the results. There was such a media outrage about Trump that no one wanted to be the source that predicted a Trump victory for fear of being labeled a Trump supporter or Q-Anon fear-monger, so a lot of them just changed the results.

    • Let me say that again, they changed their own findings on purpose for fear of what would happen to them. And because of this lack of reporting real results, a lot of people that probably would’ve voted for Clinton, didn’t go to the polls.

    • And then, if you can believe it, the same thing happened in 2020. Even though Biden ultimately won, the predicted stats were way wrong. Again, according to the data Biden should have been comfortably able to defeat Trump, but it was one of the closest presidential races in history. In fact, many believe, if not for Covid, Trump would have won. And this, at least a little, contributed to the capital riots.

    • @6mementomori@lemmy.worldOP
      -1•1 year ago

      Oh yeah. I might say some wrong stuff since I’m quite ignorant but. Statistics is messy and I tend to avoid including too much stats in my projects, although sometimes I accidentally end up blindly doing so and believing them also drawing inaccurate conclusions. Physical stats are even messier because not everybody has the competence to accurately understand what they mean, or sometimes we just don’t understand the world enough. Environmental science data is an example of that. I rely on other people’s analyses cause I can’t read them. I don’t know much about politics.

    • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
      1•1 year ago

      All media outlets were predicting a landslide victory for Clinton. But then, as we all know I’m sure, the unbelievable happened: Trump won the electoral college. Why didn’t the data predict that?

      Nate Silver was singing a different tune, though. I remember an interview he gave a month out from the election where he noted significant softness in support for Clinton. There were also a lot of undecideds who might swing elections in key states. That is, of course, exactly what happened. When the Comey letter was leaked by Congress, it likely cost Clinton the election. Her poll numbers dropped from +7% to +3%, well within the advantage that the Electoral College gives to Republicans.

      On Election Day, the 538 model was about 3:1 in favor of Clinton. That sounds highly in favor of Clinton, and it is. But it still leaves plenty of room for a Trump win. And lo and behold, she lost.

      • @erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
        1•1 year ago

        That’s interesting, I did not think the letter had that big of an impact.

        For me it was Bernie. I remember a lot of us on Reddit were all about Bernie.

        Iirc, Bernie had a lot of steam and it seemed like again Clinton was going to be pushed aside for a grass-roots candidate (just like with Barak years earlier).

        And Bernie said he was not going to give up the race, because even if he didn’t win the votes he could still be voted in at the national convention.

        And as the DNC neared, things were looking great. Clinton was giving paid speeches to wall street and Bernie was tearing her whole campaign apart because he was saying, give money back to people and she was saying keep things the way they were.

        And then, among mounting pressure, two weeks before the convention he concieded out of nowhere. At least that’s what it seemed like to us.

        Then emails leaked that showed the Democratic Party had colluded with Clinton to get Bernie out of the race!

        We couldn’t believe it. We were devestated. So some people went to the DNC and were making a big stir, demanding that Bernie get back on the ballot.

        And it all came to a waterfall moment when Sarah Silverman was on stage. And people were chanting Bernie and she lost it and told everybody to shut up and said the Bernie supporters were stupid.

        And that was it. The only thing that came out of it was somebody got fired, but there was no regard or representation for us in the Democratic Party anymore.

        They didn’t care about what we wanted, and they were just as crooked as they had always told us the Republicans were.

        For me it was a massive dissolutionment, and drove me to Trump. Since he was saying we need to take our economy back from the 1%.

        • @pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          I won’t say Bernie supporters weren’t a factor, but the prospect of “buttery males” was an easily measurable factor. Trump was having a really rough few weeks running up to the election. He had a piss poor debate showing, the Access Hollywood tape, and sexual assault allegations all coming together against him. Even with Russia laundering their hack of John Podesta’s emails through Wikileaks and Wikileaks working working with the Trump campaign to drip out the hacks, Trump was well behind. It was hard to see anything with Bernie supporters because that played out over the entire campaign. Meanwhile, the Comey letter had an immediate effect over mere days.

          Clinton was giving paid speeches to wall street

          Note that Clinton’s speeches were from well before the campaign. When I looked at the transcripts when they got released as part of the Russian hacking, I could see why she didn’t want them released. There were parts where she was being more frank about certain subjects than politicians usually are. It was easy cherry pickings from there. And as much as the paid speech circuit has its detractors, I’d rather see former or dormant politicians giving empty platitudes to rooms full of bankers than lobbying their former colleagues.

          she was saying keep things the way they were

          At the very beginning of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, she did a tour of the nation and just listened to people’s problems and concerns. From there, she drew up a platform. She has a history of doing this sort of thing like when she was a senator in New York, where she tackled loss of jobs in upstate New York in areas that had been ignored.

          She also was pretty blunt with certain areas, like talking in West Virginia about needing to plan for a future after coal. To his credit Bernie didn’t jump in there to attack her, but he also didn’t exactly jump to cover the subject. Trump of course did, lied to the workers, got their votes, and they’re still losing jobs anyway.

          And it all came to a waterfall moment when Sarah Silverman was on stage. And people were chanting Bernie and she lost it and told everybody to shut up and said the Bernie supporters were stupid.

          She shouldn’t have lost it, but I can see why. I remember Bernie supporters in general getting extremely annoying around that time. It’s the same attitude that we saw out of Trump supporters: everyone I know loudly supports Bernie/Trump, no one I know supports Clinton/Biden, therefore I was cheated. I couldn’t poke my nose up on /r/politics in support of Clinton without getting my face gnawed off.

          And that was it. The only thing that came out of it was somebody got fired, but there was no regard or representation for us in the Democratic Party anymore.

          There was supposedly a takeover of the DNC by the Clinton campaign. This is a questionable interpretation. tl;dr: A heavily indebted DNC traded fundraising by the Clinton campaign for some control. Nothing stopped Bernie from a similar deal. Also Donna Brazile told the Clinton campaign that there would be two questions: one on capital punishment and the second on lead in drink water. I’m sure she had a stock answer for capital punishment. For the second, the town hall was in Flint, Michigan. Yeah, of course they’re going to ask about lead.

          For me it was a massive dissolutionment, and drove me to Trump. Since he was saying we need to take our economy back from the 1%.

          Did Trump ever actually say that? I ask the question because Trump does this thing where he leaves himself as a blank canvas. Two supporters with different values can believe contradictory things about Trump without there actually being evidence of a contradiction because he either never said anything or because he just says things without meaning them.

  • Retro
    30•1 year ago

    Light roasted coffee has more caffeine than dark roasted coffee.

    Technically, per bean, more of the caffeine is cooked out of the dark roast. However, other things are also roasted out of a dark roast to the point that the individual beans are also lighter and smaller. When brewing coffee, usually you either weigh your dose of beans out, or you use a scoop for some consistency. Either method will result in more dark roast beans ultimately making it into the brew than would with a (larger, heavier) light roast.

    Typically, this more than cancels out the reduced caffeine content per bean, so a brew of dark roast coffee still typically has more caffeine in it.

    • @Acetamide@lemmy.world
      2•1 year ago

      If I remember correctly, dark roast was also originally devised to hide bad-quality coffee beans. Nowadays it is often implied that darker roasts are better, which actually isn’t necessarily the case.

      • Jay K
        1•1 year ago

        Dark roasts have a more consistent taste/flavor and it has a longer shelf life, so it’s easier to know what you’re getting. If you want to taste the variety of flavors coffee can have, you’ll go for fresher lighter roasts.

      • @Fenzik@lemmy.ml
        2•1 year ago

        Implied where? All the coffee snobs ik ow drink lighter roasts and derogatorily call dark roasts “supermarket coffee”

  • jeff
    4•1 year ago

    Those who took the covid vaccine have a mortality death rate of 9.172/1000 in the USA.

    • @AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
      1•1 year ago

      In a similar vein, people on puberty blockers have a higher mortality rate.

      (Because those medications are used in combination with other treatments to help treat certain cancers.)

      • @Firefly7@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        5•1 year ago

        HRT is short for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a treatment many transgender people use to feel more aligned with their gender identity. It’s been proven to increase mental health, and has a low regret rate. However, it is correlated with higher mortality because trans people overall have a higher mortality rate and HRT is primarily used by trans people.

        A more extreme example of the same thing would be “People on chemotherapy have a higher chance of dying from cancer than people not on chemotherapy.” It’s true, but only because people without cancer don’t tend to enter chemotherapy.

        • @AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
          6•1 year ago

          Trans people on HRT may have a slightly higher mortality rate (the suicide rate declines significantly with HRT), but OPs statement is true because most people on HRT are cisgender and old - estrogen is a common treatment for menopause symptoms and products like androgel are specifically marketed to cis men with age related decline in testosterone.

    • @davidgro@lemmy.world
      1•1 year ago

      This one is great, I absolutely believe that conservatives would (and I’m sure do) pass it around like some profound statement.

    • @Firefly7@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      7•1 year ago

      explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:

      Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion–driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won’t take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.

  • Buglefingers
    7•1 year ago

    Since the invention of seatbelts there have been a larger number of serious injuries from car accidents.

    This sounds like seatbelts are causing serious injury but in fact, these serious injuries used to be deaths. That statistics is never mentioned causing it to be misleading, just like they never mention how many bugles are in the car when an accident happens

  • @grue@lemmy.ml
    10•1 year ago

    Of the ~100 billion humans who have ever lived, about 8 billion (8%) are still alive today. Therefore, your chance of dying is 92%, not 100%.