{"id":6590,"date":"2021-03-15T00:57:18","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T04:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/?p=6590"},"modified":"2021-03-15T01:02:24","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T05:02:24","slug":"blog-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/2021\/03\/15\/blog-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

I liked the part in the reading that talked about how you might get data from the questions you ask, but it might not be answering the question you thought you were asking. In the example about what magazines people had in their homes, the researchers knew based on the circulation data for the magazines that people were lying and saying that they had the \u201chigher brow\u201d magazine. This showed that they weren’t actually measuring the kind of magazine people had in their homes, but instead their level of \u201csnobbery\u201d (18). We\u2019ve been discussing this in my Social Science Inquiry class for Political Science and Jepson about how to collect this information, so it\u2019s really interesting to discuss how data\u2019s presentation can be manipulated. In the podcast, Dr. Bezio discussed how cheating numbers is a trick as old as time, and even if the numbers aren\u2019t entirely fabricated, they are sometimes \u201cbeat into submission\u201d to say what the author wants them to say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I definitely fall into the trap of accepting numbers at face value. Even from the first example in the reading about the specific income of Yale Class of \u201824 students, I made the assumption that if the number was specific, that also meant it must be very accurate. Learning this is not the case and that can be due to sampling errors and bad assumptions was a little embarrassing because it made me aware of how much I take numbers at their face value. As a humanities student, I am guilty of thinking that numbers aren\u2019t lying to me because they feel so scientific and concrete. Honestly, looking at lots of numbers scares me and I prefer not to do it, but Dr. Bezio made a good point in her podcast that understanding numbers and statistics is an essential part of making good arguments in humanities fields. Who knows, maybe if I\u2019m actually learning statistics in the context of things I care about it will be more understandable and interesting. After doing this reading I\u2019m more aware of the common tricks for falsifying data so I can pick it out better in the future. My other major is Political Science, so understanding when someone is BS-ing numbers will likely be of critical importance going forward in my career! Below is a graph that I made as a joke for my application to meet Hasan Minhaj. It is a bad chart. I falsified all of my data and probably based it on untrue assumptions,\u00a0 my axis makes no sense and isn’t really labeled, but it was apparently pretty convincing to my audience because I achieved my goal of meeting him! I promise to never intentionally make a graph this trash again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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I liked the part in the reading that talked about how you might get data from the questions you ask, but it might not be answering the question you thought you were asking. In the example about what magazines people had in their homes, the researchers knew based on the circulation data for the magazines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4600,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6590"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6596,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590\/revisions\/6596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}