The Numbers Guy

In an age when logic, reason and science rule,people are much too often taken in by fancy charts, polls or statistics.
Those printed Arabics become our pacifiers; in a world where conflicting values interweave and coexist in cypher, where skepticism predomonates and alienation prevades, our instinct in response thrusts us forward to the shelter of numbers and figures, for they seem to cause less misinterpretation and allow little room for subjective manipulation.

However, the polls and statistical numbers are in essence artificial; they are yielded from a man-made (or even manipulated)process.

True, no one can escape the natural urge to impose order on chaos by evaluating and categoraizing information as we recieve them. However, the observed patternes and statistics among events are only a sypnosis,or some simplified version of the true happening.

We, simply put, see what we choose to see.

And the following best illustrates this fallacy.
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http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756654401855352xisp
PstH0o243rbAHAQzmN09ppM_20070907.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top