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Damned Lies and Statistics (view source)
Revision as of 22:00, October 20, 2007
, 22:00, October 20, 2007the incidence of homosexuality among adults is between 1 and 3 percent
Amazon.com says:
Amazon.com says:
*"Bad statistics live on," writes Best in this highly accessible book, "they take on lives of their own." Take this one: a psychologist's estimate that perhaps 6 percent of priests were at some point sexually attracted to young people was transformed through a chain of errors into the "fact" that 6 percent of priests were pedophiles. Then there was the one about eating disorders. An original estimate that 150,000 women were anorexic, made by concerned activists, mutated into 150,000 women dying from the disorder annually (the truth: about 70 women a year). But these two mutant statistics have been published and passed along as facts for years, enduring long after the truth has been pointed out. [http://www.amazon.com/Damned-Lies-Statistics-Untangling-Politicians/dp/0520219783]
*"Bad statistics live on," writes Best in this highly accessible book, "they take on lives of their own." Take this one: a psychologist's estimate that perhaps 6 percent of priests were at some point sexually attracted to young people was transformed through a chain of errors into the "fact" that 6 percent of priests were pedophiles. Then there was the one about eating disorders. An original estimate that 150,000 women were anorexic, made by concerned activists, mutated into 150,000 women dying from the disorder annually (the truth: about 70 women a year). But these two mutant statistics have been published and passed along as facts for years, enduring long after the truth has been pointed out. [http://www.amazon.com/Damned-Lies-Statistics-Untangling-Politicians/dp/0520219783]
==Interesting facts==
Best reports:
*Most social scientists consider Kinsey1s 10 percent estimate for homosexuality too high; more recent, more reliable studies have consistently produced lower estimates.
He cites the work of Edward O. Laumann, et al. to assert that:
*...the incidence of [[homosexuality]] among adults is lower - between 1 and 3 percent