[jerf]

There's the old story about Charles Babbage and his not understanding how you can feed garbage to a computer and people will believe the output, but in a sense it goes deeper than that; put a number in front of someone and I think a good 75% of the population at least will simply believe it. Not only believe it, but if someone comes along 15 seconds later with a different number, they'll argue with the new guy, even though in a parallel universe where the second guy got there first they'd have argued equally vociferously with the first guy! When objectively they have no real basis for either number, or any other.

I can also say that with every passing year I see that when the Bible talks about people who love lies it's a lot less metaphorical than I thought it was when I was younger. The stories in this very thread about managers demanding that the original, bot-inflated numbers be put back up on their internal metrics rather than have the correct and accurate one is just an example, and one particularly vivid and easy to see.

Though there is also a business opportunity there... I am also reminded of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons where the boss is viewing a defective spreadsheet that has a higher profit for the year the farther down he scrolls into it. Why not just multiply your click stats by e^(number of months since start / 20) or so? I mean, if the click counts don't have to match any particular reality, go for the gusto.

[ttoinou]

The religion of Science is being taught all over the world and the only thing people can remember from that teaching is that Numbers are good, are true, are the only thing we should take into account and are computed by kind smart rational workers.

[bombcar]

It's always important to remember: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

And what is advertising sold on but statistics, hmmm.