Statistics are fascinating. We use them to make decisions every day, and while everyone knows they can be skewed toward whatever answer you want, we just don’t often think of exactly how vulnerable they are.
With modern computers and the plethora of data that is available, we have come to rely on statistics to give us a quick snapshot of where we are and where we are going. But statistics — especially predictive or probability statistics — are vulnerable to manipulation, errors and just plain bad math. Because of how they are used, many of us have learned to take them with a grain of salt.