[codr7]

Never trust statistics.

I once worked on a reservation system for some pretty big ski resorts.

We were running late, working nights, and one of the last things we had to finish was the official statistics reports about number of guest nights etc that gets published by the government.

Lets just say that the statistics that year had little to do with reality.

[amw-zero]

You’re confusing statistics with forecasting. We can and should trust statistics. We should just never trust their relation to future behavior.

[Scrutiny6707]

>We can and should trust statistics. We should just never trust their relation to future behavior.

99% of people I've ever met believe statistics and forecasting are synonyms.

Mostly because it gets used that way in a political sense.

[swiftcoder]

Fairly sure the previous poster is describing statistics that were made up, rather than measured/sampled. Those are, for hopefully obvious reasons, not very trustworthy

[stefs]

so, the actual lesson to be learned was more along the lines of "never trust lies".

[codr7]

Sure, but in this case the lies ended up packaged as the official tourism statistics report from the government, and I'm pretty sure it was neither the first nor last time that happened.