Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
Often when statistic are being created the questions are phrased in such a way as to pre-empt the answer that the statistician wants...and of course it depends on who commissions the stats too.
You wouldn't want to be paying for a survey for it to reveal the opposite of what you wanted to show, would you? You might just as well burn your money.
As someone once said 'there are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics'(Mark Twain...I think)
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Or, as John Diefenbaker said: Politicians use statistics like drunks use lamp posts, more for support than illumination (or something close to that). He also said that "Parliament is more than procedure; it is the custodian of the Nation's freedom." Something else that parliamentarians tend to forget.