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Google Diversity Report Straight Out of 'How To Lie With Statistics' Playbook
theodp writes: Among the books recommended by Bill Gates for beach reading this summer is How to Lie With Statistics, the published-in-1954-but-timely-as-ever introduction to the (mis)use of statistics. So, how can one lie with statistics? "Sometimes it is percentages that are given and raw figures that are missing," explains the book, "and this can be deceptive too." So, does this explain Google's just-released Diversity Report and the accompanying chock-full-o-percentages narrative (find-all-%-image), which boasts "the Black community in grew [sic] by 38 percent", while the less-impressive raw figures — e.g., the number of Google employees increased by 5,928, but the ranks of Black females only increased by 35 (less than 0.6% of the net increase) — are relegated to a PDF of its EEO-1 Report that's linked to in the fine-print footnotes? To be fair to Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon didn't want people to see their EEO-1 numbers, either.
I've always used an example of how statistics can be deceiving. If you put 99 rocks and a chicken egg in a box, and a baby chick walks out, there was a 99% chance that it came out of one of the rocks.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I've actually done this using my real name and a variation of it. My real name didn't get an interview, the fake "English" sounding one did. I didn't go, but man it was depressing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC