That's a carelessly considered statement. Although there are of course
bad practitioners who simply make mistakes, statistics itself is an
extremely rigorous discipline. Wrong answers from statistics almost
always come from one of two failures:
1. Not properly understanding the physical process to which statistical
analysis was applied. It happens all the time when people run a test
without taking into account all the variables. They test the variables
they know about and apply statistics to the resulting data, but get
wrong results because they didn't include all the relevant variables in
their test.
2. Having a pre-existing bias that skews the data sample or the test
itself. Most people are not truly unbiased about any topic, and many,
many experiments are crafted (knowingly or unknowingly) to prove a
result, not investigate it.
Dave AB7E
On 9/1/2010 6:47 AM, Frosty wrote:
> Statistics is also calculated guess work. You can make statistics give any
> answer you want.
>
>
> Charles F. Frost
> Frosty K5LBU
> frosty1@pdq.net
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