R Dubya

Crone.

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@PinstripeBungle ive been sooooo curious about the post crimea russian diaspora... along with the recent Olympics, this fills in some gap beautifully!

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@weathernetwork damnit.

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@weathernetwork Rain garden!!

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@Britannica the original reality tv

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@PhilsPlot no arch.... but still...
#rosewednesday

:)

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@ihtesham2005 would Gemini have happened if the space hadn't been created when everyone and everything else DID stop working in that time?

[Mother Of Eagles 🦅 @CCknockout]

The Iranians made a song about Mark Carney 🥹

[.stuff @vintagestuff4]

Honey Bear
Aaron Brent Harker

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@GrantHBrennerMD @HowToAI_ @ylecun can't get around garbage in garbage out.... unless divine intervention perhaps?

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@CaligulaXOnSol @AtMikeBrady @grok @elonmusk also this: https://t.co/wu9FbQpIxM

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@CaligulaXOnSol @AtMikeBrady @grok @elonmusk Truth in art

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@GrantHBrennerMD gives getting to read the entrails vibes...

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@giveashitnature A stumpery...my heart is beating faster all of a sudden...

[Information is Beautiful @infobeautiful]

Which country is across the ocean? Latitude map by @washingtonpost

[Boreal Conservation @Borealconserve]

From documenting community knowledge to monitoring habitats and species, the MAMKA Marine Guardians’ stewardship is helping protect the waters we all depend on. For #WorldOceansDay, we’re sharing a @land_guardians video highlighting their important work.
https://t.co/h9IBISHauZ

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

"Understanding how lies are built does not protect you from choosing to build one."

[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?

[Houstorian @Houstorian]

Today in 1969, Montrose-based, underground newspaper Space City! debuts.

[R Dubya @albertaplum]

@TheRena44620640 @AK_BridgeLake and wild geranium across the way here in Alberta on the eastern slopes :)

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A 56-year-old New York City activist saw a photograph in 1930 and bought a mountain to stop a slaughter.

Her name was Rosalie Edge. She was a suffragist with no scientific training. The photograph she saw showed hundreds of dead hawks lined up on the forest floor in eastern Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania's 1929 bounty on goshawks had turned a ridge of the Kittatinny Mountains into a recreational shooting site where men gathered every autumn to kill migrating raptors by the thousand.

In 1934, Edge borrowed $500 from a friend and leased 1,400 acres of Hawk Mountain. She hired two wardens, Maurice and Irma Broun, who lived on the property and kept the hunters off. Within a single migration season, observers recorded dramatic increases in the numbers of raptors passing the ridge as the shooting ended.

In 1938 she bought the land outright and deeded it to a new nonprofit. Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is now the world's first refuge for birds of prey. It still runs raptor migration counts that began in 1934, the longest-running such record on Earth.

[Nova Scotia Gov. @nsgov]

New Supports to Help Communities Adapt to Drought Conditions https://t.co/0t4CwnyeRp