Made up numbers hurt your case

Every now and then a graphic circulates on social media, usually making a political point, displaying a set of impressive numbers to make the case. All too often people pass these on without questioning the data. But if you do that, it is entirely possible those numbers were fictional, and instead of supporting a cause, you weaken it.

The example shown here is probably the most blatantly awful such graphic I've ever seen. So much so that I wondered if it was from a comedy news site like the Daily Mash, but as far as I can tell it isn't - and it is certainly being shared as if it were serious.

I probably can't list everything wrong with this data set, but problems include:

It mixes salaries and pensions - not a meaningful comparison
Even if you look at salaries, the numbers for politicians are totally fictional - the PM for instance has a salary of £142,500 and an MP of £67,000
According to this report in the Guardian (hardly a government lackey paper) the average pensioner income in 2011 was over £20,000 not £6578 (of course many get less, but this was the average). The trouble is, these figures compare the state pension with an occupational pension
Whether or not soldiers are paid enough is a totally separate issue, though personally I'd rather nurses, teachers, policemen etc earned more than soldiers and I would like the people who run the country paid significantly more still
The wording is a little odd. 'House Speaker' is a US term; I wonder if this is US data with the labels changed

Whenever you see numbers like check the source and do a little research before passing them on. All in all, if you use garbage numbers to support your case all you do is damage that case.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog