by Monsoon » Sat Dec 29, 2012 4:55 pm
Statisticians, are they real people?
Referring to an earlier post about vegetarianism and cancer statistics. If it is said that being a vegetarian reduces your cancer risk by half, but in actual numbers represents a change from 2 in a million to 1 in a million, is this a strong argument in favour of vegetarianism?
I think not. Although such stats ('cut risk' by half') rather than cold hard numbers may be useful for encouraging people to at least think in the right direction, it is often overused by exploitative newspeople - you can stand these people with the statisticians up against the wall.
Monsoon
peace and harmony
monsoon