less-than-average illustration
This Sunday morning, I was reading the NYT when I came upon this picture illustrating Stephanie Koontz’s tribune “when numbers mislead“, a rather dull summary of an unreferenced and impossible-to-google paper called “The Trouble With Averages” [what about Quételet?!] dealing with the impact of marriage(s) on happiness (and vice-versa). [Funny enough, Andrew was telling me about this economist from Warwick working on happiness just yesterday night!] I however wanted mostly to point out how a-statistical this picture was, from a meaningless Venn diagram (reminding me of Templeton!) to the notion of opposing average and variation, to outliers standing in the wrong place (intersection of whatever!). [I do not think it is relevant to stress the innumeracy revealed by the column and its title!]
June 7, 2013 at 4:22 am
The paper is on the CCF site that is linked from the NYT article. See http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/Marriage-Partnership-Divorce/trouble-with-averages-briefing.html
June 7, 2013 at 2:13 pm
Thank you David, I did not search deep enough… Lazy Sunday morning, eh!