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Lies, Damned Lies and Cat Statistics

Posted by samzenpus on from the nine-lies dept.

spopepro writes "While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will '...result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,' the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won't go away."

5 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No Don't Ruin This, I Need This! by cappp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's pretty much TFA's point, and it's a scary one. Interest groups propogate faulty statistics so as to support questionable claims. Exaggeration, conflation, and the like does nothing more than undermine legitimate concerns. We've seen it with climate change - the desire to effect policy by presenting worst case scenario journalism has just fed the other side.
    I remember when I got the "you're a guy so try not to rape everyone" speech in college. Good underlying point...concent is important, getting concent is complicated, sex under the influence is generally a bad idea. It was totally undermined by the 1-in-4 statistic, and the way in which it was presented, and ultimatly served to offend my friends and I while also instilling the seeds of anti-feminism (ooh those stupid fem-nazis and their crazy ideas....)in a bunch of guys. The stat is wrong, it's been shown to be lacking, and it's still repeated. It has significant utility and so it's not questioned but, ultimatly, it does more to harm a good cause than it does to support it.

  2. Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With all the fucking bullshit that ends up on the front page. All the iPhone astroturfing, all the Android FUD, all the iPhone FUD and Android astroturfing, all the dupes and tripes and all the dopes. All the ridiculous "Ask Slashdot"s that could have been solved with 2 minutes Googling...

    This ends up in idle? Mis-reporting of unsubstantiated facts by news-outlets may not be news, but it's stuff that matters, and if ever there was an example of something that shouldn't have been consigned to the idle bin, this is it! Adding some stupid allusion to lolcats does not make it idle-worthy. If someone submitted a story about the pope dying and added "His hat looks a bit like a wang! LOL" does it follow that the story should go on the Funny Pages?

    1. Re:Huh? by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 5, Funny

      ... in 3 million years you get a race of bipeds evolved from cats that are uber cool and fight wars over what colors their hats should be?

  3. Huh? by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I don't know what kind of maths they do in the Wall St Journal (yeah, I actually RTFA), but according to the maths that I do from the unfashionable side of my mother's basement, the actual number of offspring after 5 years starting with a single unspayed female cat is zero.

    Now, if one starts with two cats however, the number could well be higher...

  4. Re:No Don't Ruin This, I Need This! by cappp · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Which is somewhat my point. We were specifically told that 1 in 4 women would be raped on campus. Not 1 in 5 in her lifetime. Not with all the significant caveats and modifiers that precede the numbers at the CDC you've referenced (the 1995 numbers). Check out the 2007 numbers - it’s now 20 to 25% either attempted or completed. The Institute of Justice found that

    A survey of college women found that 2.8 percent had experienced either a completed (1.7 percent) or an attempted (1.1 percent) rape within a 9-month timeframe.
    13.7% of undergraduate women had been victims of at least one completed sexual assault since entering college: 4.7% were victims of physically forced sexual assault; 7.8% of women were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after voluntarily consuming drugs, alcohol or both; and 0.6% were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after having been given a drug without their knowledge
    Finally, a national-level study of college and community based women found that approximately 673,000 of nearly 6 million current college women (11.5 percent) have ever been raped, and approximately twelve percent of these rapes were reported to law enforcement

    I'm not questioning the underlying idea that rape is pervasive and wrong. What I'm getting at is that by dragging out exaggerated, faulty numbers you introduce weakness into an argument. Those men in that room would have been horrified to hear that 13.7% of women had been sexually assaulted on campus - but that numbers not sexy enough for widespread hyperbole. All it took was for one guy to do a little digging into the stats, find the body of literature that criticized the methodology of that one source, and campus rape became a joke to half the community. Instead of disgust we had widespread disdain for the claim itself, and that is extremely damaging.

    There is something extremely patronising, or condescending, which presumes that people cannot be motivated by subtle or nuanced arguments – every problem doesn’t have to directly affect 98.43% of the population to count.