From Human Voices:
We’ve all heard the joke about the statistician who drowned in a lake with an average depth of 4 inches and we’ve all heard the Mark Twain quote that he attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Is there any way other than appeals to faith used more to bolster weak arguments than a graph, a chart, a string of numbers? It’s so common we don’t notice and worse, we don’t check facts.
I read an article the other day which began with the observation that Japan has a higher life expectancy than the United States. That’s probably true, but the article went straight from there to a rhapsody about the Japanese diet and that theme, that Meme so adored by Americans: our food is poisonous and full of “artificial” ingredients which are killing us.
Being a skeptic by nature and particularly as concerns any article about health and nutrition or food chemistry I took the trouble to look…