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!]

This entry was posted on June 7, 2013 at 12:13 am and is filed under Books, Statistics with tags average, innumeracy, outliers, Quételet, The New York Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “less-than-average illustration”

David Says:
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

Reply
- xi'an Says:
  June 7, 2013 at 2:13 pm
  
  Thank you David, I did not search deep enough… Lazy Sunday morning, eh!
  
  Reply

Xi'an's Og