Re: They walk amongst us
"That's just the sort of conclusion one might expect from a statistician."
That statistician may have been joking, too. Jokes are easily lost in translation.
Statistics is a science that is very useful for finding correlations, but does not help much with causation. Statistical correlation is basically a label saying "this is the spot needing further research". And then there are those common pitfalls (or even devices for deliberate deception) - samples that are either too small or cherry-picked, ignorance towards reliability metrics.
Darrell Huff's 1954 book "How to Lie with Statistics" is still a worthwhile reading.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
