[raziel2701]

I saw an example of how one could make the claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and it worked like this:

population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2/84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.

And that's the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter's statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person's main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that's where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products/podcasts/supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There's a giant asymmetry here and we don't address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.

[nvusuvu]

Great, easy to understand example of a statement of 'fact' without context.

[refurb]

Or another one - hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid cases.

Then later on admitting half of those admissions weren’t for covid, but for other reasons.

[bena]

When people talk about "lying with statistics", this is what they mean.

Because when people hear "50% of the infected were vaccinated", they're going to misapply the symmetric property and assume 50% of the vaccinated were infected. Even though these are entirely separate things.

Edit: You realize that I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to and providing a slight paraphrase to what he's saying, right?

[rory]

To be honest I don't find that sort of claim overly deceptive. % of infected that are vaccinated is an important metric because it helps describe the further reduction in infection that is possible through further vaccination. That's an obviously different metric than infection rate, and should be understood as such. The root problem is widespread statistical illiteracy.