PHL 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Misleading Graph, Spurious Relationship, Fallacy
8 Jun 2020
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Arbitrary features: subjective: depending on who you are and what you are looking for, this changes the ordinal rankings, arbitrary: let"s say a came in 1st and b came in 5th. You would think that b is much worse than a. But if the overall ranking leaves out the fact that 1000 products were actually evaluated and only the top 5 were listed, you would think that b must be pretty good. The problem of confused quantification extends to the comparative uses of different metrics or measuring systems. Comparing two completely different things will make the comparison meaningless. Graphical fallacy: misrepresentation of quantities/rates by misleading graphs or charts. Includes unclarity, poor choices of units/metrics, spurious correlation. The mean: an arithmetically calculated average, representing the sum of the values of a sample divided by the number of elements in the sample: usually, average means the arithmetical mean.
