{"id":2396,"date":"2005-06-20T23:30:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-20T23:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2396"},"modified":"2018-06-01T13:20:53","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T18:20:53","slug":"fun-with-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/20\/fun-with-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun With Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the story &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/archive.columbiatribune.com\/2005\/jun\/20050620news011.asp\" target=\"_new\">Supporters of increasing tax on cigarettes quietly push on<\/a>&#8220;, we get this insightful statistical analysis from the Associated Press:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The &#8220;why&#8221; goes something like this: Missouri has the third-highest smoking rate in the nation, spends the third-lowest amount on anti-tobacco efforts and charges the third-lowest cigarette tax.<\/p>\n<p>The correlation is no coincidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No wonder polisybodies like statistics.  Unlike real science, statistics are just like language&#8211;they can say whatever you want, and you can deconstruct the meaning of the numbers-as-text to imbue them with whatever liberation (of citizens&#8217; money-as-tax) theory you espouse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the story &#8220;Supporters of increasing tax on cigarettes quietly push on&#8220;, we get this insightful statistical analysis from the Associated Press: The &#8220;why&#8221; goes something like this: Missouri has the third-highest smoking rate in the nation, spends the third-lowest amount on anti-tobacco efforts and charges the third-lowest cigarette tax. The correlation is no coincidence. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19948,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396\/revisions\/19948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}