Cracked - The 5 Most Popular Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You
This article, in a nutshell, sums up the most common fallacies committed using statistics. This is the sort of thing that gets taught in introductory statistics classes (which, by the way, I think every school child should be required to take, exactly for this reason).
Humans are terrible with numbers. They just don’t fit in our brains. It’s why scientists can hammer us with statistics about global warming but we will stop believing in it as soon as it gets cold where we live. It’s not our fault — the human brain just isn’t built for this, and quite frankly, we don’t really need to process huge numbers to get by in our everyday lives. You don’t have to understand long term data trends in order to change a goddamn light bulb.
But there are some basics that everyone should know. Each of them sounds incredibly simple when it’s explained, yet each of them will fool you again within days of reading this article. So try to keep in mind …