[PLUG-TALK] the joy of spreadsheets (or, How To Lie With Statistics, 2013 version)
Rich Shepard
rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Tue Apr 16 19:56:56 UTC 2013
This articles shows how cherry-picking data can seriously skew the
results. Picking only those data that support your point of view is far too
prevalent in science and politics.
Rich
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Given that we occasionally run into problems with comparing Excel results to
R results, and other spreadsheet-induced errors, I thought this might be of
interest.
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems
The punchline:
"If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made,
well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the
core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the
global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone
accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel."
Ouch.
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