Question

Discuss an example you have of when you thought the information provided was bias or misleading. This could have been an ad, a commentary, or other data source. Your example must be about data.

Answer 1

Advertisers have been using data analysis to prove their statistical point for decades. It is the best way to convince people. numbers give a tangibility to data which otherwise might be difficult to understand for laymen. But sometimes, advertisers or data analysts present data which is wrongly collected or might be plainly misleading in the way it is presented.

One of the prime examples of misleading data is when we see a certain percentage of people using and recommending a product like a percentage of dentists recommending using a particular toothpaste brand. While the percentage rate is absolutely correct, there is simply no explanation provided about how many people the statistical data was collected on.

In the example of the dentists recommending a particular brand of toothpaste, it might be possible that only 3 or 4 dentists were asked about their opinions and they all favored that particular brand. Therefore, while the data showing the toothpaste is recommended by 100% dentists might not be technically wrong but it is misleading as the number of people who took part in the data collection was not enough to base a legitimate data analysis.