Lying with Numbers

A critical review of my previous analysis with an eye towards statistics and the importance of context in numbers.

Critical Review of Statistics

In a previous post, I presented a basic risk analysis to demonstrate the value of engineering and the capabilities of risk analysis. However brevity required that I showed just the results, without any of the analysis. When we present numbers like this, with no context, it becomes very easy to sound convincing and to lie with numbers.

So today I present a critical review of my own presentation and address the wider issue of statistics. We see statistics all the time in scientific papers. And the nightly news presents graphs and figures that people misinterpret as statistics. But with all these numbers, you have to ask. Why do we need more? What is so important about statistics?