I hate it when people say “Drinking/eating such and such a food may reduce your chances of gettins such and such a disease by #%.” Don’t get me wrong, it may be true, and I’m not questioning that (most of) the statistics are accurate and scientifically found.
But really, people, if you take a disease where the chances of getting it are 2 in 1,000,000 and reduce those chances by 50%, what do you get? 1 in 1,000,000. Either way, the chances are slim enough that you probably wouldn’t have to worry about it. Advertisers aren’t counting on that, though, they want us to believe that drinking/eating whatever product they’re pitching will suddenly make them immortal and invincible to (insert name of disease here) .
The same goes for stuff that’s supposed to make you less healthy, like that PETA scandal with mayor Guiliani(sp?).
they are real good at that on Detroit 6 o’clock local news. “Your children may die if you don’t watch our story on ham sandwiches. At 11.” I stopped caring when they told me that reading may cause blindness.
“According to a recent study, the majority of LA citizens are minorities.”
That was a serious headline. It was on the Tonight show (actually, it was in the monologue, not Headlines, but Jay still commented on how stupid it was.)
Maybe I should get this moved to MPSIMS (or let it die) because it’s not a pitty(?) subject anymore.
I remember once figuring out that the average American uses the New York Ciy subway just over 4 times a year, IIRC. While amusing, it obviously means nothing.
One that really gets me is comparing the GPA’s of college students who are in fraternities with those who aren’t. These usually make the fraternities look bad, but are flawed in many ways. First is the issue of causality. The simple comparison of GPAs doesn’t show to what extent being in a fraternity is the cause of having a lower GPA. A larger flaw is that people not doing well in school are more likely (a lot more likely, as I recall) to stay at the school if they are in a fraternity. You’d think that the school would encourage that.
I’m in a fraternity, by the way, so I’ll admit to being biased.
I can tell ya where a lot of it comes from: On a slow news day, the local TV ‘personalities’ (may they all come down with terminal lockjaw) have to have something to fill up their time slots. Whether or not it’s anything useful, or accurate, is unimportant. Having reached our saturation point with this crap, hardly anyone is paying attention.
I overheard him telling someone “Oh, I guess I’m about 400 pounds. I stopped listening to what the doctor said I weighed at 350. You know what he said last time? That I should go for walks and eat less fat. Like I’d never heard THAT before! Say can you bring some of those bagels and cream cheese by here when you come back. I hate to cross the room if I don’t have to. Strains my let you know.”
Opps, forgot how it ties in.
So anyway, you can ignore any good advice if you try. No need to blaim statistics. If the odds were 4:5 that you would get the disease, you’d still say statistics won’t make you change.