Friday, December 31, 2010

All out of context

As the herpes and hypergamy discussion (which also erupted here) reminded (almost) everyone, statistics can be wildly misleading unless you know at least a little bit about the context. I got another reminder of that recently while poking around on a site called NationMaster, a site that aggregates stats about the world found in the (very useful) CIA Factbook and other sources and makes them a little more user-friendly.

Which isn't always a good thing. As we learn from this contextless factoid I  found festooned at the top of one page:


Yeah. I think if you really do like kids, you might want to think a little about why half the population in Uganda is under 15 before planning your move there.

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