Students must learn to question statistics
You’re the 99 percent.
Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street protests, that statement is now full of negative connotations: debt, joblessness, misery.
Still, look at the number — what does it actually say?
It’s easy to see why statistics are appealing. They have the power to make broad claims seem concrete.
In a tidy manner, they tell us the scope and seriousness of the problems we face.
Jovanna Tosello | Daily Trojan
Unfortunately, people often arrive at those tidy figures in a disorganized fashion. Few people are dishonest enough to completely falsify their numbers, but many popular statistics create a deceptive picture of reality.
Because new media proliferates statistics at a greater rate than ever before, all levels of education need to address the issue of misleading statistics. Students should come to college with basic skills in statistical analysis.
Take the divorce rate for example. If you’ve heard (and believe) America has a 50 percent divorce rate, you’re not alone. I took that statistic at face value for a long time, having read it again and again.
Recently, though, I came across an article that debunked it. According to The New York Times, this particular statistic determines the divorce rate by calculating the amount of new marriages that end in divorce.
The article estimates that the actual percentage has never been higher than 41 percent.
New media compounds the problem. Though journalists do make mistakes, legitimate media organizations have a system in place to fact check and correct falsehoods that have already been printed.
The same can’t be said for bloggers, who, with a few clicks, can make misleading statistics available to anyone with an Internet connection. Most gossip sites aren’t any better. There’s a better way to filter bunk statistics — getting in touch with our inner skeptics.
Bunk statistics with particularly juicy implications have gone viral. In July, Gawker.com posted a chart showing the White House’s top 21 pay raises. The employee at the top of the list got an 83 percent increase. This statistic was surrounded by familiar inflammatory rhetoric: Government employees cash in while everyone else sizes down.
In August, FactCheck.org put Gawker in its place. The University of Pennsylvania-based nonprofit reviewed White House data more closely and found 19 of the 21 staffers received raises because they had been promoted.
Of those 19, 14 were promoted into existing positions; six were paid the same amount as their predecessors, and five were actually paid less. The chart wasn’t wrong. But taken out of context, it made the government seem like it was just tossing money around.
Social media websites can be even more problematic. We’re more likely to trust information that comes from familiar faces, even if the level of familiarity is low.
Of course, people have long passed on misleading statistics in day-to-day conversation, but idle chatting doesn’t instantly reach 500 people.
Now, the process goes more like this: Someone finds a shocking statistic, he becomes fascinated and he shows it to everyone from his ex-girlfriend to that camp friend he hasn’t actually communicated with in six years.
There’s a missing step, though: asking questions. Where did the numbers come from?
Imposing censorship on blogs and social media websites would be blatantly unconstitutional.
Basic education on the nature of statistics should start at the high school level.
Social science classes should incorporate lessons on rudimentary statistical analysis when students learn to write research papers. It’s important students realize early on that numbers don’t always tell the whole story.
Moreover, high school teachers and college professors alike should encourage students to supplement their news intake with media monitors like FactCheck.org.
Media monitors perform the kind of in-depth analysis most people don’t have the time for. The good ones take transparency seriously; they take readers through the reasoning process.
We can’t debunk every statistic that comes our way, but in the name of knowledge, we have to try.
What is the 99 percent?
Maya Itah is a senior majoring in communication. Her column “From Behind the Screen” runs Thursdays.
Wow, you have got to be kidding me… how many crazy lunatics can there possibly be at USC, let alone comment on one post! Somehow this has turned into some neo-Nazi Holocaust denial convention.
Please for the love of God can some sane, rational people not filled with hate and disdain for Jews comment on this? The author must be sickened with embarrassment for what is appearing on her page, even though it’s through no fault of her own.
Who knew people were so stupid?
So I see this story about questioning statistics has been hijacked by the revisionists and conspiracy theorists. Oops, did I call names? Sorry, but I call them like I see them. Oh, how they love to use scientific terminology and quote “scholarly” works to “prove” their point. This interaction is actually quite useful to young students reading this thread. There will ALWAYS be a segment of EVERY society that will go to great lengths to distort the truth with “statistics” and “scientific findings” of their own. Educate yourselves with basic quantitative analysis, scientific methods, and pay special attention to history so that people who try to snowball you will melt away.
Call whatever you like, but you seem to be missing a point here: it’s not the revisionists who are ‘conspiracy theorists’. If anyone, that would have to be the ‘believers’ – like you, apparently. Because, fact-wise, the ‘Holocaust’ is nothing more than a ‘theory’ of a German ‘conspiracy’ to murder all Jews in Europe.
“(…)with “statistics” and “scientific findings” of their own”
Scientific findings are characterised for being disprovable and reproducible. Which all revisionist findings are. Don’t trust there’s no trace of gas chambers in Auschwitz? Go there, reproduce the experiments and publish your findings, or find some fault with the method used before. THAT is science. Putting words in single quotes is not.
“Educate yourselves with basic quantitative analysis, scientific methods, and pay special attention to history so that people who try to snowball you will melt away.”
This is good advice. Perhaps you could also heed it yourself!
I would not take anything a Jew said about the holocaust, history, Hitler, God or Mickey Mouse as fact.
Any book written by a Jew would be suspect. I have been studying the holocaust topic for 15 years and have come to the point when reading the “witnesses” accounts and I must say I wouldn’t believe half the things they say.. Either they have embellished others stories, or they have been paid off to tell the story the Holocausters want you to hear or they are delusional. It would be nice to get these liars and embellisher’s to tell the whole history of the “camps”.
The cams were set up to make people LIVE not die. They had fumigation chambers for clothes, WHY? To let people die or live? They had showers, they shaved the hair off to prevent typhus, WHY? To make people die or live? You only get half the story when a Jew tells their experience of the “camps”
If a Jew was in the Japanese interment camps in the USA you would bet that stories of them being made to soap, gassed, experimented on and other so called “horrors” would be rampant. Thank God we we’re saved from the part of history by the Japanese who told the truth. Have a Jew tell the story and forget it.
Joe
CCFIILE.com see holocaust links
Joe: it is obvious that you, like me, are animal (goy). It is not ours to question (despite urging of this article) any statistics quoted by a statistician who said his Kol Nidre.
Our choice is to obey and be rewarded with Civi-LIE-zation or not and end up with Extermination.
As for internment camps, I think it is fair to refer to the entire USA as nothing but a giant internment camp, that all outsiders, especially the Muslim ones, envy because they hate our freedoms (as per the sentence above).
@Honestly:
I get the feeling that you have never delved into the subject of the Holocaust, else you might have questioned the 6 million number.
Where did you discover “…the “fact” that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust?…”
Where did you get the naïve idea that “…It’s reasonable to question that number…”. Reasonable or no, it is de jure illegal throughout Europe
1. To question the number
2. T o demonstrate conclusively through the science of anatomy; physiology; inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry; geology; hydrology; ballistics; logistically and good ole fashioned common sense that the death of millions of Jews in gas chambers as recounted by Holocaust survivors is impossible, or
3. Though notwithstanding that literary tons of National Socialism documents were were collected in the waning days of WW II and subsequent, NOT ONE DOCUMENT HAS EVER BEEN FOUND to show that there was in place a policy for the systematic extermination of Jews.
4.
State publicly or publish any of the above in Europe, and one will find oneself severely deprived of wealth by heavy fines and a long time of “three hots and a cot” is some jail in just about any country in Europe. ( More than 11,000 have been so charged in Germany.
And if you think you’re safe outside of Europe, think again (Have you ever stop to think – and then not been able to get started.). “Holocaust denial” which covers a number thoughts and expressions spoken, published in hard copy or on the net that the Chosen Exceptionalists find distasteful is a violation of Israeli law for which Israel can seek extradition. It is unlikely that most countries would comply. However, with the “special relationship” that Uncle Sam aka Onkle Schlomo der Schmuck has with Israel WTF you’ll find yourself in the cargo hold of of a Lear Jet paid for by Goldman Sachs heading for Tel Aviv.
Or you could very well be set upon by Jewish thugs, no less evil that Hitler’s Brown shirts or Mussolini’s Black Shirts, as was poor Robert Faurisson, who was nearly beaten to death. Or your warehouse of documents dealing with holocaust revisionism burned to the ground with total destruction of it all. Crime remains unsolved as authorities did a cursory investigation.
Further, if you knew the REAL MEANING of the Magical 6 Million, you would know why it is so important to zionasties around the world and nut cake christonasties here in America that the number remain sacrosanct. Surely, you do not think that Jews pulled that number out their nether parts? So important is that number that as the numbers of deaths as memorialized at Auschwitz was reduced not once but twice, instead of rejoicing over this fact that fewer Jews had died, the Chosen added the subtracted numbers to deaths by gas at other camps mainly Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
The methods of killing described by “witnesses” is so incredible in absolute unambiguous definition, that gassing by carbon monoxide generated from the Diesel engine became the agreed upon method. The problem here is that lack of any real knowledge of automotive engineering, the witnesses didn’t know that the exhaust from a Diesel engine, where very stinky IS NOT LETHAL EXCEPT UNDER RARE CIRCUMSTANCES AND A LENGTH OF TIME THAT WOULD HAVE REQUIRED GAS CHAMBER DEATHS TO HAVE CONTINUED INTO THE 1970’S IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE THE MAGIC NUMBERS. Moreover, pumping Diesel fumes into hermetically sealed rooms would caused have at a minimum the roof to blow off. Some witnesses claimed that after the victims were crowded into then hermetically sealed rooms. This would have resulted in the building even if made of brick or concrete to implode. This is elementary high school physics and math.
One would have to have the intellect of the ovine and bovine which is exactly as Talmudists describe goyim.
As Casey Stengel used to say,
Yaah, cud (no puns intended) lookit up! (Yes. I did intend)
I did and Jett probably did too.
It called critical thinking. It is really important to the learning process. It is verboten to give any critical thinking to any aspect of the Holocaust unless it passes through the filter of Specialized Jewish Historiography where up is down, mass grave site magically are expanded to accommodate imagined hundreds of thousands of bodies, where bodies are buried in mass graves 10 meters deep in areas where the water table is approximately 5 meters or less as describe by internees attempting to tunnel their way out.
You could look that up, too.
The only thing preventing you from know what Holocaust Revisionists know, is intellectual and cultural sloth.
I mean this in a nice way, of course
Babylon, the Romans and then the Nazis were the destroyers of civilization. Therefore belief in the Holocaust is the founding basis of our modern civilization. Anyone who questions that six-million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis is a DENIER who DENIES CIVILIZATION and must in turn be exterminated as an example of the atrocity that the NAZIS DID and AS AN EXAMPLE TO ALL NEO-NAZI HOLOCAUST DENIERS. For the good of civilization all anti-Semites must perish. NEVER AGAIN!
Perfect!
Thanks.
Is the ” Holocaust ” a ” Religion “?… I have to belief in!
It is highly doubtfull that Babylon, the Romans and the Nazis are the destroyers of civilization! Is there eventually something else, who would be capeable to help to destroy the leftover of our
almost completely corrupted endtime civilization? What law justifies the extermination of a
” DENIER “? Where can I find more detailed informations about the six – million Jews, exterminated by the NAZIS?
Honestly, where would you draw the line, if 1 million victims is just as deplorable as 6 million? Let’s keep dividing the number until you finally agree that, Yes, this number is less deplorable.
How about 100 victims, is this just as deplorable, in fact, at what number does the “genocide” tag kick in?
Jett’s comment was about TRUTH, not DENIAL.
Is it not deplorable to play fast and loose with facts, inserting highly questionable claims like soap+lampshades made from dead Jews and prosecuting the skeptics (this has now been totally debunked, yet no one issued a public retraction)?
If not, let’s ramp it up, e.g., golf balls made from human eyeballs, is this deplorable or ridiculous or sacred?
On the other hand, Lancet reported some while ago that over 1 million Iraqis were killed (which by this time probably increased to 2 million, i.e., possibly TWICE the number that is so “tragic, disgusting, or deplorable” to you) by the US occupation.
Would this, well researched FACT, qualify for the same level of compassion, not to mention the reparation claims as the Holocaust? If human life is worth the same everywhere on Earth, then the answer should be YES, yet I do not see it.
I hope you are starting to see the point and if some Iraqi starts claiming that 15 million were killed by Allied invasion and occupation forces, would you say that it makes no difference?
If TRUTH matters at all, how do you arrive at it if you are stigmatized for checking and verifying the claims?
@Honestly, there are a LOT of FACTS in play in this matter. There are Facts concerning numbers (X millions).
There are Facts concerning this Genocide thingie (WHAT): intention to murder a race/class/group on the one hand, versus desire to remove them from one’s “own” living space/enslave them in an existential defense effort against invasion.
There are Facts concerning WHO: not only Who the victims were, BUT Who the perpetrators were: the German invaders, or the vengeful local populace resentful at a group among them who oppressed and harassed them for years prior to the Germans’ arrival.
I already mentioned one of the Facts concerning How (gas chambers).
You can concern yourself, if it somehow suits you, with what I might believe/suppose/doubt, or WHY, or WHO I am, or think I am, or want to be thought (here we go again), OR you can join with me and others in as honest-as-possible an investigation into ALL the evidence for and against various Facts that are alleged or otherwise detected.
And if you’ve REALLY got guts (this is optional), when various previously announced Facts (e.g., the Katyn Massacre, at 15,000 perhaps not a “genocide,” and no Jews for that matter) turn out not to be facts, you can concern yourself with where the misinformation came from, and go right back into the Who, How, When, Where, Why.
It’s all very interesting. But all I’m asking for is a stop to the name-calling, recriminations, and the hairy eyeball.
Nice words here from Mr. Jett Rucker. Comes off as very open minded, but manages to distort several important components.
1) Mr. Rucker presumes no discussion is allowed on the Holocaust, specifically the number of victims and how such a figure was achieved. Academic discussion IS allowed regarding the Holocaust. It takes place everyday here in the United States, as well as around the world wherein new evidence and theories are raised regarding such a horrible event. Those who deny the event (as Mr. Rucker wishes) are allowed to voice their views, but their ARGUMENTS are not deemed serious by the overwhelming majority of scholars.
2) The issue and definition of “genocide” is also still in debate among those in the field of genocide studies. It is my understanding that when one group targets another and acts to “remove them from one’s “own” living space/enslave them in an existential defense effort against invasion”, such would not be regarded as genocide by many scholars; instead perhaps a form of ethnic cleansing or the like. It should be kept in mind, however, that while Mr. Rucker would like to view the Holocaust as just such an event -non genocide- such is simply not supported by the wealth of eyewitness, documentary, and material evidence.
3) Questions of ‘Who, How, When, Where, Why’ are indeed important topics to consider for any type of critical analysis on a theory. Such questions provide a helpful litmus test in weeding out fanciful theories berefit of evidence, as the case of Holocaust denial.
SO GLAD to encounter your inclination to discuss matters (notwithstanding your imputations of beliefs/motivations to me)!
Genocide is a label, used to demonize the intentions of a group (a group’s INTENTIONS CANNOT be treated as a single thing, even IF an individual’s can). Discussions about its definition remind me of disquisitions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I deny NOTHING, except (tentatively) the construction/use of gas chambers AND a genocidal INTENT, and I’m willing/eager to consider evidence to the contrary.
DO carry on! Discussion/debate is the point, and at the point where we’re doing that, I’ve gotten what I want.
Mr. Rucker,
I didn’t intend to insinuate any motivations towards you besides those which you seem to be actively supportive of, particularly the denial of gassings as a form of extermination, which is serves as an integral component of the Holocaust. You later state that you deny the construction/use of gas chambers, as well as genocidal intent by the Nazis. I wouldn’t accuse you of being a Nazi or whathave you, if that is how you took it-apologies.
I appreciate that you are eager to discuss the evidence for these matters. I do enjoy debating the topic as I do enjoy challenging my own views and reinforcing them with research and information. We can strongly agree. A debate over the necessary evidence is likely to be inappropriate to the USC forum.
I would suggest CODOH’s own discussion forum but debate is highly restricted at that site. I myself was permanently banned from the site, despite having constructive discussions with a number of revisionists, including Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom. As you are affiliated with CODOH, might I ask why that is so? I laud your free speech and open debate ideals but paradoxically this is not so within your own ‘back yard’ or so it appears.
Yours truly,
Ray
Here, our poster (among other things) demonstrates a critical activity at the heart of what we often hear is the purpose and function of the academy: DISCUSSION – in this case, of an iconic statistic.
There are other statistics just as iconic, and more-hallowed, that you’re NOT ALLOWED to discuss, NOT EVEN in the academy, or at USC in particular. Take, for example, the Six Million Jews said to have been killed during World War II by the Nazis. No Discussion of THAT one!
Take issues like whether the Nazis designed, built, and used gas chambers to rack up that sacred statistic. UH-UH! Discuss THAT one, and you’ll have Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League (which DEFENDS the defamation of Germans) all over you!
In fact, I’ll be surprised if this comment even makes it past the censors. Maybe you’ll never see it, proving my point. And you’ll go on thinking that you’re free to discuss the statistics people use on each other.
Wow, didn’t see where that post was going right away.
But yeah, if private groups want to go after you for questioning a statistic, I suppose they can. It will be hard, also, to get any grant money to research the claim, since most people don’t want to touch it with a 39 1/2 foot pole. You can see the difference why, though, when it could be construed as questioning genocide or Israel’s right to exist. Indeed, you’ll raise some hackles. Talking about divorce rates and wealth distribution isn’t nowhere near so touchy (though even the 99% talk brings up cries of “class warfare!”).
So yeah, I think if you can go find a funder for a rigorous, peer-reviewed investigation and ignore the complaints of the ADL, go for it. Until then, though, that one is accepted conventional wisdom and playing the holocaust-denial game gets you in hot water.
Jett, I get the feeling that you do not believe the “fact” that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust? It’s reasonable to question that number as long as you are not attempting to deny the FACT that a genocide occurred and that genocide in unacceptable under any circumstances. So what if that number was exaggerated and ONLY 3 million innocent men, women, and children were killed because of their religion? Or how about 1 million? Would it be any less tragic, disgusting, or deplorable? To most people, the answer is NO. The exact number is not nearly as important as the meaning behind it.
Professor Arthur Butz gives the definitive comment on the “Holocaust” in his book “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”:
“The Jews of Europe were not exterminated and there was no German attempt to exterminate them. The Germans resettled a certain number and these people were ultimately resettled again in accordance with Allied programs. Although various statistical details are missing from our analysis, it was possible to reconstruct quantitative aspects of the problem to a satisfactory degree.
The Jews of Europe suffered during the war by being deported to the East, by having much of their property confiscated and, more importantly, by suffering cruelly in the circumstances surrounding Germany’s defeat. They may even have lost a million dead.
The “gas chambers” were wartime propaganda fantasies completely comparable to the garbage that was shoveled out by Lord Bryce and associate in World War I. The factual basis for these ridiculous charges was nailed down with perfect accuracy by Heinrich Himmler, in an interview with a representative of the World Jewish congress (Dr, Norbert Masur) just a few weeks before the end of the war.”
‘In order to put a stop to the epidemics, we were forced to burn the bodies of incalculable numbers of people who had been destroyed by disease. We were therefore forced to build crematoria, and on this account they are knotting a noose for us.’ (Source: Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution).