Commoner

A little bit of everything. Ambedkar. Rational.RTs not endorsements.

[Commoner @Sadharan_]

@ndtv Tu news channel hai?🤣

[Pragnya Gupta @GuptaPragnya]

A Life That Served a Purpose
In a world chasing fleeting applause, some souls choose the long, quiet road of service. Today, welfare economist Jean Drèze has been honoured with a global award for his profound research on poverty and inequality in India.

Born in Belgium, he made India his home and its people his purpose. With a scholar’s rigour and a revolutionary’s heart, he stood beside the forgotten—documenting their struggles, amplifying their voices, and shaping policies that reached millions.

His tireless advocacy helped birth two landmark legislations that still stand as lifelines: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which offered dignity through work to the rural poor, and the National Food Security Act, which sought to ensure no one sleeps hungry in a land of plenty.

This is not just an award. It is recognition of a life lived in radical empathy. Of choosing dusty villages over ivory towers. Of measuring success not in citations or comfort, but in the quiet lifting of human suffering.

Jean Drèze reminds us that the highest calling is to use one’s intellect, privilege, and time in the service of those who have the least.

In an age of cynicism, his journey is a living ode:
To knowledge that heals. To scholarship that serves. To a life that mattered.

Congratulations and Thank You Professor Drèze.
India is better because you walked among us.
May your example inspire a new generation to stop performing compassion and start practising it—with depth, persistence, and love.
🧡 🙏
#JeanDreze #ServiceAboveSelf #India #SocialJustice

[Matthew @goingbungus]

He also rapes children. Shut the fuck up

[Mukesh @mikejava85]

"We are JAINs,we aren't corrupt like Hindus"

Meanwhile Jain scammers ..

[RamaKrishna Vadlamudi, CFA @vrk100]

@Sadharan_ NRI remittances to India (no future liability for the country) are part of current a/c; whereas FDI is part of capital a/c (creates a FUTURE LIABILITY).

Business Line @businessline front page misses this.

For more, you can check my blog.

[nandu @gatha_writes]

Haan Indian women ka toh roz ka hai

[Commoner @Sadharan_]

@vrk100 @businessline @srirags Please explain in brief for laymen like us.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A freelance journalist who had never taken a statistics course wrote a 142-page book in 1954 that professional statisticians still hand to students before anything else, because nobody before him had bothered to explain the tricks in plain language.

His name was Darrell Huff. The book is called How to Lie with Statistics.

I read it in one sitting and spent the next three days noticing the tricks everywhere.

Over 1.5 million copies have sold in English alone. It became a standard college textbook in the 1960s and 70s. Seventy years later it is still in print, still assigned, still the first thing a working statistician reaches for when they want to teach someone to think clearly about numbers.

The man who wrote it was not a researcher. He was a freelancer who wrote how-to articles for magazines. He had no PhD, no academic post, no institutional affiliation. He just understood that numbers could lie without technically being wrong, and he thought someone should explain how.

His opening line sets the whole tone of the book.

"The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense."

That one sentence is the entire argument. The manipulation is not coming. It already happened. It happened this morning in the article you read and the chart someone showed you at work and the study your doctor quoted. The only question is whether you know what to look for.

Huff called the first trick the Well-Chosen Average.

When someone tells you the average salary at a company is $80,000, they have told you almost nothing. If the CEO earns $2 million and the 20 employees earn $30,000 each, the mean is $80,000. The median is $30,000. Both are technically correct. One is a lie. The person reporting the number chose which average to use, and they almost always chose the one that served their argument. Huff's rule: whenever you see an average with no description of which average it is, ask.

The second trick he named the Gee-Whiz Graph.

A line chart shows company profits rising. The line shoots nearly vertical, almost doubling in height across the chart. You feel impressed. Then you look at the y-axis and notice the chart does not start at zero. It starts at 94. The actual increase in profits was 3 percent. The dramatic visual was produced entirely by cropping the bottom of the chart. Nothing in the data changed. The picture changed everything.

Every news organization on earth still does this every day.

The third trick is the one that should change how you read every study you ever encounter. Huff called it Post Hoc Rides Again, which is short for the Latin phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this.

Cities with more churches have more violent crime. Therefore churches cause violence. The logic is airtight. The conclusion is absurd. Both church attendance and crime go up as population grows. The two numbers track each other because a third variable drives both. The correlation is real. The cause is invented.

Huff showed that this structure is not a rare mistake. It is the default pattern of almost every study reported in a newspaper, because causation is a boring word and because proves is a better headline than correlates with.

The fourth trick was the one that floored me. He called it the Semi-Attached Figure.

A headache pill company claims their product is twice as fast as the competition. The study behind the claim is real. The product was tested and the numbers are accurate. What the advertisement does not mention is that the study measured absorption rate into the bloodstream, not relief of headaches. The two things are related but not identical. The statistic is real. It is attached to the wrong conclusion.

Huff said this is the most dangerous trick of all because the number is never fabricated. You cannot fact-check a semi-attached figure by verifying the statistic. You have to ask whether the statistic actually measures what the claim requires it to measure.

Almost nobody asks.

There is one part of Huff's story that most people who recommend the book leave out.

Years after he wrote it, he was hired by the tobacco industry. He worked on a follow-up manuscript called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, designed to cast doubt on the research connecting cigarettes to cancer. The book was never published. He testified before Congress in an attempt to undermine the statistical evidence against tobacco.

The man who wrote the clearest guide to spotting statistical deception spent the end of his career deploying those same tricks against evidence that was killing people.

That detail does not make the book wrong. The tricks he described are real and the defenses he taught are still the right ones. But it is a reminder that the tools in the book are neutral. Understanding how lies are built does not protect you from choosing to build one.

The crooks already know these tricks.

Some of them wrote the manual.

What is one statistic you have seen recently that you now think deserves a second look?

[Ashish Kumar @BaapofOption]

Ravi Gupta at its best. That isn't a joke. Thats the reality 😭

[VILLAIN$ @VILLAIN05A]

Now delete your account

[Cāmuk @Albert_Camuk]

Indian journalism isn’t even fit to serve street-food on anymore.

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

Shamli SP in a video to Aaj Tak Said, Ayush Malik might still be in touch with Religious scholar from Pakistan, Dr. Israr Ahmed.

Israr Ahmad Passed away in 2010.

[Zara Quinn @_Zaraquin]

Shut the fuck up chandresh from india

[General Dong @Rise_of_Ancient]

@ShamikaRavi Uh oh ... Uh oh ... Uh oh ... Uh oh ... Uh oh ... Uh oh ... .............

[Hugh Laurie @hughlaurie]

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.

One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??

The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.

Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

[Hassan Mafi ‏ @thatdayin1992]

Iran be like:

[Commoner @Sadharan_]

@AtheistBong

[Commoner @Sadharan_]

@ShaykhSulaiman Want new videos

[RTSG @RTSG_Main]

The world when Iran fires rockets at Israel.

[mustafa yazıcı @myzccc]

🚨İsrail “Boom Boom Tel Aviv” şarkısını her yerden kaldırtmaya çalışıyor.

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