Councilman Brian Swingles Magical Incantation Fuzzy Math: his claim that almost 70% of the residents of Hunter Hills are concerned about some kind of crime is the kind of fuzzy math that makes your teeth hurt. First of all, his 70% number comes from adding up two statistics that have little in common. Susan Lax and the Hunterdon Helpline surveyed 75 residents of Hunter Hills and discovered that 14% felt that crime was a serious problem; and 53% felt that crime was a little or minor problem. So, the first Magical Incantation Fuzzy Math was to ADD these numbers TOGETHER and create a new more general category not in the survey of some kind of concern about crime. Fact is that everyone will have some opinion about crime concerns from serious to none at all. You dont get to add them up for political purposes. That leads to bad statistics which leads to bad policy (in this case, eminent domain as a solution to crime). The next Fuzzy Math is how Swingle takes the added numbers (14% + 53% = 68%) and rounds up to 70%. A typical trick to make the stat sound more important, when its not. Classic. Finally, as to the Susan Lax/Hunterdon Helpline survey itself: Swingle is on record as being very critical of the survey ITSELF for only having 75 responses. So, he harshly criticizes the survey, but then uses it anyway where it serves his purposes. Thats like the old joke, The food here is horrible; but there are such small portions. Remember Brian is up for re election this year, and that eminent domain is not a solution for crime of any type. OrganIzing tenants and greater police presence (sub station, community policing) is. I welcome Brian to post an answer to this.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 14:06:16 +0000