"Facts are stubborn things"
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact.
John Adams' argument for the defense: 3-4 December 1770
See also the information from Quote Investigator regarding attribution of "Facts are stubborn things" to Tobias Smollett and Alain-René Lesage, plus earlier variations.
- Adams' Argument for the Defense: 3-4 December 1770"Facts are stubborn things..." appears in the 2nd to last paragraph.
Fact Checking Websites
- FactCheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania)"a nonpartisan, nonprofit "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding."
- PolitiFact: Sorting out the truth in politics"a project of the Tampa Bay Times to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-O-Meter."
- Fact Checker (Washington Post)"The purpose of this website, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to “truth squad” the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local."
- Facts First (CNN)"CNN holds elected officials and candidates accountable by pointing out what's true and what's not."
- Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts- Pay attention to the domain and URL
- Read the "About Us" section
- Look at the quotes in a story
- Look at who said them
- Check the comments
- Reverse image search - Fact-Checking News (Duke Reporters' Lab)The Reporters’ Lab maintains a database of global fact-checking sites.
- International Fact-Checking Network (Poynter Institute)"The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is a forum for fact-checkers worldwide hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. These organizations fact-check statements by public figures, major institutions and other widely circulated claims of interest to society."
- First Draft"First Draft is an organisation dedicated to supporting journalists, academics and technologists working to address challenges relating to trust and truth in the digital age."
- Lead Stories"Lead Stories is a U.S. based fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet."
- TruthOrFiction.com"Get the truth about rumors, inspirational stories, virus warnings, hoaxes, scams, humorous tales, pleas for help, urban legends, prayer requests, calls to action, and other forwarded emails."
- Urban Legends: Politics (Snopes.com)analyzes factual claims and attributions of many of the widely circulated stories.
- Politics: Soapbox (Snopes.com)"Many political opinion pieces circulate with no identifying authorship or publication information, or with credits mistakenly attributing them to the wrong sources. In this section we attempt to set the record straight on those counts for some of the more widely-circulated pieces."
- Urban Legends: Politics / Law / Government (About.com)"Urban legends, rumors and Internet hoaxes pertaining to government, politics and politicians."
- Urban Legends & Hoaxes Resource Center (scambusters.org)"lets you quickly find out whether popular (and usually 'urgent') emails are true -- or whether they are urban legends or hoaxes."
- Annenberg Classroom"Resources for Excellent Civics Education" - "nonpartisan writers sift through national and local news and selected current events expressly for social studies classrooms"
(previously FactCheckED.org) - Digital Resource Center: Center for News Literacy"This Digital Resource Center is all about sharing the accumulating wisdom and materials of the News Literacy teaching community, which works to strengthen democracy by teaching students to pluck reliable information from the daily media tsunami."
- Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkersby Michael A. Caulfield
"This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly."
Media Bias & Censorship
- Media Matters for America"a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."
- Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)"the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986."
- Media Bias (AllSides)"AllSides empowers you to understand the role media bias plays in the news and information you consume. The AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ and AllSides Media Bias Chart™ help make news bias transparent, allowing you to identify different perspectives and political leanings so you can get the full picture and think for yourself."
- NewsBusters"Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias"
- Project Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News"conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media."
- The Memory Hole 2"exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known. The emphasis is on material that exposes things that we’re not supposed to know (or that we’re supposed to forget)."
How to Lie with Statistics
Damned Lies & Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, & Activists by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- HM535.B47 2001ch2ck availability of print version
"Using examples from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers and television programs, he unravels many fascinating examples of the use, misuse, and abuse of statistical information. In this book Best shows us exactly how and why bad statistics emerge, spread, and come to shape policy debates. He recommends specific ways to detect bad statistics, and shows how to think more critically about "stat wars," or disputes over social statistics among various experts."
More Damned Lies & Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- HM535.B474 2004ch2ck availability of print version
Underlining the importance of critical thinking in all matters numerical, Best illustrates his points with examples of good and bad statistics about such contemporary concerns as school shootings, fatal hospital errors, bullying, teen suicides, deaths at the World Trade Center, college ratings, the risks of divorce, racial profiling, and fatalities caused by falling coconuts. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues: missing numbers are relevant but overlooked; confusing numbers bewilder when they should inform; scary numbers play to our fears about the present and the future; authoritative numbers demand respect they don't deserve; magical numbers promise unrealistic, simple solutions to complex problems; and contentious numbers become the focus of data duels and stat wars."
Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, & Other Ways to Lie with Statistics by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- QA279.S638 2014ch2ck availability of print version
"In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful indicators and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves."
How to Lie with Statistics by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- HA29.H82 1993ch2ck availability of various editions
"Darrell Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to fool rather than to inform."
How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- P93.5 .C26 2019ch2ck availability
We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don't understand what we're looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous--and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter--if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways--displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty--or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie, data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.
How to Lie with Maps by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- G108.7.M66 1996ch3ck availability
"To show how maps distort, Monmonier introduces basic principles of mapmaking, gives entertaining examples of the misuse of maps in situations from zoning disputes to census reports, and covers all the typical kinds of distortions from deliberate oversimplifications to the misleading use of color."
The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Call Number: UCF ONLINE General Collection -- HA29.H2498 2021NOTE: Online access is limited to 1 simultaneous user.
From "one of the great (greatest') contemporary popular writers on economics" (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics. Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That's a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn't be suspicious of statistics'we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often "the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us." If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly'understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray'statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.
A Field Guide to Lies: critical thinking in the information age by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- BC177.L486 2016ch3ck availability
Introduction: Thinking, critically -- Plausibility -- Fun with averages -- Axis shenanigans -- Hijinks with how numbers are reported -- How numbers are collected -- Probabilities -- How do we know? -- Identifying expertise -- Overlooked, undervalued alternative explanations -- Counterknowledge -- How science works -- Logical fallacies -- Knowing what you don't know -- Bayesian thinking in science and in court -- Four case studies -- Conclusion: Discovering your own -- Appendix: Application of Bayes' Rule
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy & Its Consequences by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- QA93.P38 1988ch3ck availability
"Dozens of examples in innumeracy show us how it affects not only personal economics and travel plans, but explains mischosen mates, inappropriate drug-testing, and the allure of psuedo-science."
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- QA93.P385 1995ch3ck availability
"Employing the same fun-filled, user-friendly, and quirkily insightful approach that put Innumeracy on best-seller lists, Paulos now leads us through the pages of the daily newspaper, revealing the hidden mathematical angles of countless articles. From the Senate, the SATs, and sex to crime, celebrities, and cults, Paulos takes stories that may not seem to involve mathematics at all and demonstrates how mathematical naïveté can put readers at a distinct disadvantage."
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- QA99.S45 2010ch3ck availability
"The bestselling author of Zero shows how mathematical misinformation pervades-and shapes-our daily lives. Numbers have peculiar powers-they can disarm skeptics, befuddle journalists, and hoodwink the public into believing almost anything."
Stat-Spotting: a field guide to identifying dubious data by Call Number: UCF ONLINE General Collection -- HM535.B47 2013NOTE: Online access is limited to a specific number of users.
Are four million women really battered to death by their husbands or boyfriends each year? Does a young person commit suicide every thirteen minutes in the United States? Is methamphetamine our number one drug problem today? Alarming statistics bombard our daily lives, appearing in the news, on the Web, seemingly everywhere. But all too often, even the most respected publications present numbers that are miscalculated, misinterpreted, hyped, or simply misleading. Following on the heels of his highly acclaimed Damned Lies and Statistics and More Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best now offers this practical field guide to help everyone identify questionable statistics. Entertaining, informative, and concise, Stat-Spotting is essential reading for people who want to be more savvy and critical consumers of news and information. Stat-Spotting features: * Pertinent examples from today's news, including the number of deaths reported in Iraq, the threat of secondhand smoke, the increase in the number of overweight Americans, and many more * A commonsense approach that doesn't require advanced math or statistics
Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True? by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- ZA4201.S44 2014ch3ck availability
"Charles Seife uses the skepticism, wit, and sharp facility for analysis that captivated readers in Proofiness and Zero to take us deep into the Internet information jungle and cut a path through the trickery, fakery, and cyber skullduggery that the online world enables. Taking on everything from breaking news coverage and online dating to program trading and that eccentric and unreliable source that is Wikipedia, Seife arms his readers with actual tools--or weapons--for discerning truth from fiction online"
The Signal and the Noise: why so many predictions fail-- but some don't by Call Number: UCF MAIN General Collection -- CB158 .S54 2012ch3ck availability
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future. In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good--or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary--and dangerous--science. Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.
Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist by Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- BF441.W29 2016ch3ck availability of print version
"Escaping from the clutches of truthiness begins with one question: "What's the evidence?" With his usual verve, and disdain for pious nonsense, Howard Wainer offers a refreshing fact-based view of complex problems in altitude of fields, with special emphasis showing in education how to evaluate the evidence, or lack thereof, supporting various kinds of claims. His primary tool is casual inference: how can we convincingly demonstrate the cause of an effect?"- Lies, Calculations and Constructions: Beyond "How to Lie with Statistics" byStatistical Science. 20(3):210-214
"Darrell Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics" remains the best-known, nontechnical call for critical thinking about statistics. However, drawing a distinction between statistics and lying ignores the process by which statistics are socially constructed. For instance, bad statistics often are disseminated by sincere, albeit innumerate advocates (e.g., inflated estimates for the number of anorexia deaths) or through research findings selectively highlighted to attract media coverage (e.g., a recent study on the extent of bullying). Further, the spread of computers has made the production and dissemination of dubious statistics easier. While critics may agree on the desirability of increasing statistical literacy, it is unclear who might accept this responsibility."
- What Educated Citizens Should Know About Statistics and ProbabilityIn the article “What Educated Citizens Should Know About Statistics and Probability” author Jessica Utts highlights a few types of statistics that are commonly misunderstood.
- Millions, Billions, Zillions: Why (In)numeracy Mattersvideo of 2011 Harvard University luncheon talk with Brian Kernighan, PhD, Princeton University
"Technology has buried us in an avalanche of numbers and graphs and charts, many of which claim to present the truth about important issues. At the same time, our personal facility with numbers has diminished, leaving us at the mercy of quantitative reasoning and presentation that is often wrong and sometimes not disinterested. Numeracy is basic numeric self-defense: how to assess the numbers presented by other people, and how to produce sensible numbers of one's own."
liveblog of the talk - Spurious Correlations (Tyler Vigen)"Spurious Correlations was a project I put together as a fun way to look at correlations and to think about data. Empirical research is interesting, and I love to wonder about how variables work together. The charts on this site aren't meant to imply causation nor are they meant to create a distrust for research or even correlative data. Rather, I hope this project fosters interest in statistics and numerical research."
Quick Math Checks
Can you quickly evaluate whether or not a reported statistic seems reasonable?
[Sources deliberately not cited for the following statistics; verify them yourself rather than trusting this page blindly.]
World Population
- 6 billion -- it is actually estimated as 7.5 billion in 2017, but 6 is easier than 7.5 to use for quick math estimates
- 1 billion in China (2017 estimate = 1.4 billion)
- 1 billion in India (2017 estimate = 1.3 billion)
- 500 million in European Union (2016 estimate = 508 million)
U.S. Population -- if something happens to almost every American once in their lifetime, how many each year?
- Adjust the actual values to simplify the math (2017 U.S. population = 326 million; 2017 U.S. life expectancy = 76.73 years)
- Divide 300 million Americans by life expectancy of 75 years = 4 million Americans per year
- 4 million Americans are born each year
- 4 million Americans die each year
- 4 million Americans turn 21 each year
- 4 million Americans per year equivalents:
- 300,000 Americans per month (333,333)
- 75,000 Americans per week (76,923)
- 10,000 Americans per day (10,958)
Average individual's time spent at work in a year
- 50 weeks = 52 weeks - 2 weeks (vacation, holidays)
- 250 days = 50 weeks x 5 workdays/week
- 2,000 hours = 250 days x 8 hours/day
Power of 2 -- how quickly does doubling grow?
- 2^2 = 4
- 2^5 = 32
- 2^10 = 1,024 or approximately one thousand
- 2^20 = 1,048,576 or approximately one million
- 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 or approximately one billion
Rule of 72 -- approximately how many years are required to double something at a given annual percentage growth?
- Divide 72 by the percentage
- 72 / 2% = 36 years
- 72 / 3% = 24 years
- 72 / 4% = 18 years
- 72 / 6% = 12 years
- 72 / 8% = 9 years
- 72 / 9% = 8 years
- 72 / 12% = 6 years