PROMOTING BAD STATISTICS.

This article deals with principles that can serve as guidelines for creating and disseminating dubious social problems statistics. It was said that in contemporary society, social problems must compete for attention, to the degree that one problem gains media coverage and moves to the top of politicians' agenda or become the subject of public concern. Social problems statistics often involve dubious data. Activists trying to promote a new social problem view false negatives as more troubling than false positives. Any effort to improve the quality of public discussion of social statistics needs to begin with the understanding that numbers are socially constructed. Public discussions of social statistics need to chart a middle path between naivete, the assumption that numbers are simply true and cynicism, the suspicion that figures are outright lies told by people with bad motives.