One of the challenges of living in a world where people don’t have any ability to critically think is right now is statistics.
As I’m going through my inbox this morning, I’ve seen plainly wrong uses of statistics to make a point. And to be a little direct about it: It’s people who should know better and ones who are using the American public’s waning critical thinking against them. I find that to be incredibly cynical and deeply unwelcome.
Two stories stood out to me:
- Adam Mosseri, while discussing Instagram changes, saying less people are using Instagram for posting images.
- The CPO of Anthropic saying that they’re hiring fewer entry-level people.
But what got me thinking about this was a post someone sent me from Reddit that was around the prevalence of Catholicism in the United States. (As a Catholic, this was news to me.)
You can see the map here and it captures how openly hostile we’ve become with our use of statistics. At first glance, it obviously looks like the penetration of believers when it comes to Catholicism is so much higher than all the other states.
But when you look at the data correctly, you see that the segmentation breaks up all of the denominations of Protestantism. So someone would be convinced that there’s a huge growth of Catholicism in the United States, but in fact it’s just that they’re not counting the split of Protestants across all denominations.
This isn’t all that different from how Adam Mosseri and Meta cynically capitalize on a monopoly and tell a story based on their own design changes. A month back I posted about Instagram’s sneaky way of injecting music into your posts and automatically turning them into Reels.
That artificially inflates Reels adoption and it’s being done to tell a fictional story about that feature’s adoption. Lo and behold, Adam Mosseri announces that Instagram will change “due to the people’s preference for changing media.”
This is not the way to use statistics.
Anthropic cited an internal report saying that they are hiring less entry-level workers out of college. It’s designed for you take away that “Claude is so good and powerful that Anthropic is putting their money where their mouth is and hiring less entry level workers.” The thing is, they’re not doing anything different than what most companies have been doing over the last five years. If you look at job requirements for entry-level people and you spot check them across, say, 200-300 postings, I can almost guarantee that all of the “entry-level” people will have been required to have 2-3 years of experience.
So, this is *also* not how to use statistics.
I’m calling this out because this is happening in almost every press release I’ve seen as it relates to nearly everything now.
Work gang — you don’t need to manufacture statistics that don’t really exist. You need to study what you have so you learn from them.
Meta/instagram lost the cultural battle to TikTok in no small part because of that.
Let’s learn the lesson, shall we?