Bad statistics. Bad Statistics: USA Today. Not suprisingly, bad statistics can be found in almost any daily issue of USA Today, one publisher’s attempt at a newspaper for the masses (which I often read while travelling, since it is free… you get what you pay for, I suppose).
In a story today, Is ‘failure to launch’ really a failure? , the writer (and headline editors) suggest that there’s a significant growing trend of children living at home with their parents in their mid-20′s. THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS By Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers.
The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).