Heres an article about Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to demonstrate the ignorance of the press and Congress with headlines and quotes. Good idea, except the article suspects that he fabricated the quotes (theyre both old jokes, and if genuine, he failed to properly source them). Worse yet, Tyson definitely gets the technical aspect wrong himself on them. The technical error is with the statement Half the schools in the district are below average. Tyson presents it as one of those Well, duh kind of statements, which is supposed to be true by definition. Unfortunately, it isnt. Tyson is making a first semester statistics error in confusing a Mean (or Average) with a Median. Take the following list of numbers: 100, 99, 98, 97, 1. The average is 79, and only ONE of those 5 numbers is below average. The other four are above average. Theres nothing terribly unusual or unlikely about that happening. On the other hand, the MEDIAN number (i.e. the one in the middle) is 98. And sure enough, half of the other numbers are above it and half below, which, by the way, is what Median means. But its not what Average means. I can cut Tyson a little slack here. Its not easy to present dry technical stuff in an entertaining way, so trying to make it funny or interesting is a good idea. Finding a well known joke to illustrate the points is also good. But youve still got to get the actual facts right. And the very idea of having to make up quotes to make Congress or the Press look dumb is kind of mind boggling. The article doesnt mention it, but changing your view 360 degrees on something is also possible. It just means ending up where you started. Its true that most of the time that Ive heard someone say something like this, theyd really meant to say 180 degrees, but the statement is not wrong by definition, as Tyson implies. Bonus Question. The Three Ms that I remember from First Semester Statistics are Mean, Median, Mode. Weve just discussed Mean and Median. Without looking it up (the article doesnt mention it), who knows, or wants to have a guess what a Mode is? thefederalist/2014/09/10/super-scientist-neil-degrasse-tyson-doesnt-understand-statistics/
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 20:10:42 +0000
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