What Percent of Statistics are Made Up?

What Percent of Statistics are Made Up?

There is no agreement on made up facts.

When someone comes to a forum and posts 56% of xxx are yyy. My usual retort is “78% of statistics are made up on the spot”.

But how accurate is this, really? Is it 78% or did I pull that number out of nowhere?

There is much disagreement on this important subject. A quick Google search revealed how far this disagreement has gotten.

This guy says its 98%. Improbable. Someone out there -has- to be throwing about actual information.

This guy says its 47.3% (but later corrected it to be 43.7%) - not credible, obviously. If you can’t type, you surely can’t make up a believable number.

This guy says its 96%. So he’s an optimist; compared to the guy who thinks that 98% are made up.

Being the internet, what is the definitive source of such information? Google? Nope. Wikipedia? Good lord, no. Yahoo? I laugh.

It’s spam of course. From the spam email archive; 95% of statistics are made up on the spot.

I’ll be damned…could I have been wrong? Wait. In my never ending quest to be right; this site claims that 77% of statistics are made up. I think I’ll go with that; but add a margin of error (1%) to the number.

Therefore, my original assertion that 78% of statistics are made up is completely accurate. And; when dealing with fake numbers, accuracy is important. Ask Lancet, they know all about fake numbers and accuracy, they’d agree with me.

(For the record, I spelt “statistics” wrong about 10 different times in this post - I think I found all the spelling errors, though. 78% of people do spell statistics wrong on the first try, you know).


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  1. Olly on April 27th, 2007

    Mine 98% was a mis-remembered Vic Reeves quote - he actually said 88.2% :)


  2. comicsnob.com » Top 100 manga volumes, 11 November on November 11th, 2007

    [...] This weeks quote was originally pulled from The Quotations Page and attributed to Anonymous. A little digging shows that it is likely a misquotation (or addition) to an original quote from Steven Wright, though the 98% figure has been claimed (perhaps aftert the fact?) by Clovis-Sangrail at Deviant Art. A quick synopsis & review regarding this issue can be found at lorien1973.com. [...]


  3. Unique Shopping Destinations within Delhi on March 1st, 2009

    [...] 78% of all men/women when asked about his/her ideal way to spend their leisure time would say Shopping. [...]


  4. Memememeeee on May 26th, 2009

    Well I would think that all statistics are made up. The ones that sight a reputable source sometimes have empirical evidence, though.


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