Exactly How Many?

Posted by jns on 31 January 2005

From The Los Angeles Times story U.S. to Overhaul Training of Iraqi Forces, reporting on the confirmation hearings of Condi Rice as Secretary of State, comes this extraordinary statement:

The Pentagon wants to train about 135,000 police officers, 62,000 national guardsmen, 24,000 army troops and others for a security force totaling 271,041.

What is extraordinary is this number: 271,041. Not, mind you, “271,042″ or “271,043″ or even “about 270,00″, but exactly “271,041″. [N.B. This statement originated with The Pentagon, and not with the LA Times.]
This is a beautiful example of gratuitous quantification and misguided precision. In this context, specifying “…and forty-one” is simply absurd: there is no reason to think that the number could possibly be known to that precision, and suggesting otherwise is misleading , inaccurate, and wrong, as well as being an obvious display of innumeracy that should never appear in Congressional testimony or come out of the Pentagon.
All this would be true, even if the first part of the statement didn’t say

The Pentagon wants to train about 135,000 ….

thus limiting, by saying “about”, the expected precision of the numbers right up front.

The Top 1%

Posted by jns on 8 December 2004

Indulge me in just a couple quotations from Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
First, for later use in writing about epidemic innumeracy and its threat to the public, this alarming but illustrative statistic (p. 302):

Are you in the top 1% of earners? 19% of Americans say “yes”!

(This may come originally from an essay called “For Richer”, by Paul Krugman, that appeared in the New York Times, 20 October 2002.)
Now, from p. 352, the chapter called “What is a Lie”?:

And all the lies, small and large, add up. They create a worldview in which the mainstream media is a liberal propaganda machine. In which Democrats are ruthless, manipulative power grabbers. And also sissies. Where if you’re poor, you should blame yourself, and for everything else, blame Clinton. Where Democrats feed a culture of victimhood, but where the real victims are decent, hardworking white males. The right-wing media’s lies create a world in which no one needs to feel any obligation to anybody else. It’s a worldview designed to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the afflicted.