by Ken Smauthi

Created on: December 07, 2008   Last Updated: December 08, 2008

Statistics lie, this we know for a fact. When both sides of any argument can quote competing statistics in order to prove their point, it becomes obvious that these prized facts and figures are nowhere near as reliable as we want them to be. Is the truth out there? Can statistics help us find it? Maybe.... but we're going to need to completely change the way that we think about statistics if we're ever going to get there.

Statistics have a power over us. It's a power that we willingly give them when we throw critical thinking to the wind in favour of numbers that purport to be hard little nuggets of truth. We want statistics to give us firm answers that we can use to bolster our arguments. And while this helps statistics to mislead and confuse us, it's an understandable reaction. After all, who likes uncertainty?

But the world is filled with uncertainty, and our best efforts to bring light to an issue often amount to little more than a weak flashlight beam. And while the truth is that one can easily lie with statistics, the greater truth is that it's far easier to lie without them. So even if we're not always able to make perfect sense of an issue with statistics, we should still come up with some criteria for evaluating statistics rationally. By doing so we can decide what claims to give greater weight, even while admitting that the answer remains uncertain.

Ideally, what we want to do when assessing any study or statistic is to look at the original data. Find out how the numbers were calculated, what methods were used for collecting the data, what definitions were used, and all the other nitty gritty little details so that we can come to a conclusion about the reliability of the conclusions. But, of course, that's not always possible. And even when it is, who has the time?

Fortunately, there are less demanding ways of assessing statistics. There are a number of tips and rules of thumb that one can use to help evaluate claims and statistics in the newspaper, on television, or quoted by friends and family. This article will lay out some of the most useful of these for your consideration.

1. Try To Put The Claims Into Perspective

Numbers are often presented to us without any attempt to put them into context. When numbers are given out of context, they can seem more dramatic than they really are. Big numbers often seem scary, and we may assume that a big number naturally suggests a big problem. So if we hear, for example, that 6,000 people a year die of reallyscarydiseaseitis,

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