Statistics = A Lie

People often rely on numbers to form an opinion and all to often they take these numbers to be truth. Yet, they, in the end, are often merely lying to themselves, especially when they use numbers to defend/condemn a risk they face or fear. The following was my responce to K.C. Cole's essay, Calculated Risks. It's a commonplace entry for my english class:

Statistics are a dangerous weapon when placed in the wrong hands. Numbers can be finagled so easily and legally to make any naive or gullible soul believe them. The evidence is altered or cut apart to appease a certain point of view. Assessing risked with statistics is equally dangerous and misleading. People often assess risk and manipulate the data to hear what they want to hear. They go wild over dangerous, obvious risks that they uncover, and ignore subtle and tiresome risks because they fear to change their world to protect themselves from the smaller, more common risks. They would rather be upset over the chemicals companies add to food, than be concerned with the huge amounts of fat they devour while plopped in front of a TV that’s been on for far too long. Why? Because they fear, more than anything in the world, change. So they don’t want to face the potato chips they gobble down or the cigarette smoke they inhale but they’d rather blame their problems on forces beyond their control. When one goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, he states, “hello, I am ____, and I am an alcoholic.” He admits to a weakness. People don’t like to do that. It makes them feel weak. Weakness is evil, it brings shame and pain. People hate pain. They go at great lengths of avoiding it and hiding it, so they manipulate the numbers, magnify unimportant risk assessments and ignore the truly significant factors in their lives. People must wake up, admit they have a problem and then do something about it. Otherwise they will always have the same problem to deal with; it will never be fixed.

In other news, Fred Phelps is sending a gang of monkeys up here to Norway Maine, about 45 miles away from my home, to celebrate the death of Sgt. Corey Dan, the tenth Maine soldier killed in Iraq, he died (IED I think) about a week ago. This action angered me.

But then I read about the life of the Pastor Fred Phelps at Wikipedia.com. Its a sad story actually. The man is violent. He is an advocate of child/wife abuse, citing the Bible as his main evidence for his abuse. He threatens anyone who crosses him with lawsuits, Hell, sometimes even death. He's defamatory, sinister and has a mean streak a mile wide. His hate is unbelieveable.

But I am clearly convinced now, after reading his biography, that Fred is simply a poor, insane, deluded man. Fred was alcoholic, abused drugs (barbituates, amphetamines), throws fits about twice a day, and has a temper worse than my own. If you read the article, you will see, the man is clearly out of his mind.

So we shouldn't be too concerned with him, nor too upset with him. He's a loudmouth to be sure, but a mouth that we should simply ignore. I listened to one of his sermons.Ten minutes of it anyways. The whole thing was him simply loudmouthing about how great his opinions are. Thats all it was. "Gays are fags and those who disagree are fags" was the general idea. Let him rant and rave for as long as he wants.

There is only one thing we should do about this church before we can ignore it completely. Put limits on funeral protests. A freedom cannot infringe on another freedom. The freedom of speech cannot infring on the freedom to grieve. Funerals are solemn ceremonies, not public forums. Keep the protesters away from funerals. Let them protest elsewhere.

But their message can be ignored.

"Boy, you just have too much energy today! Get down and give me twenty!" -Ms. Ducey, Friday's English class.

J Kuhl Signing Off