PHIL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Spurious Relationship, Misleading Graph, Percentile
3 Nov 2015
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Reasoning with numbers: much, perhaps most, public reasoning and persuasion using numbers uses them in a highly representative way: some complex state of affairs is boiled down to some number. It depends on how well we understand the state of affairs it represents, and on how accurate it is. Cdf yearbook: the number of american children killed each year by guns has doubled since 1950. Claim as written in the journal: every year since 1950, the number of american children gunned down has doubled. Cdf: n deaths in 1950; therefore 2n deaths in 1994. Journal article: n deaths in 1950; therefore n x 245 deaths in 1995. Whether the metric, or underlying measurement, is intelligibly mathematized. Meaningfulness depends in part on the size of the absolute values involved. Cannot be straightforwardly combined with other percentages, without knowing and controlling for differences in absolute values.
