Monday 2 August 2010

A thorough investigation into popular opinion of statistics

(In the interests of full disclosure, I removed a bunch of results for things such as "9 out of 10 statistics are made up" which generated artificial hits for lower numbers (10 in this example).)

I think the graph speaks for itself: most people think most statistics are made up. A couple of bonus (not entirely made up) stats are that the modal hit was "87% of statistics are made up", and the mean hit was "74.8% of statistics are made up". So next time someone tells you an alarming statistic don't worry, three-quarters of the time it will have just been made up. Possibly.