Statistical Scores

I've been accumulating twenty years' worth of detailed statistics and statistical analysis. This comprehensive archive has been of great value to me in my work and beyond, as the facts are always useful for rebutting reckless allegations and falsehoods about how good or bad some programmes or programme directors have been.

The oddest thing is that I never really noticed how successful I had been until I was told I had been unsuccessful. It wasn't pride that drove me to analysis, but curiosity. Had I really been that bad? Then I had a good hard look at the data and was pleasantly surprised to see that I had presided over the most successful span of years in the history of that institution.

These are the facts: the year preceding my first year in office was the nadir of the entire operation, and my final year was the zenith. The lie had been told that institutional results under me had been on a downward trend. I have very good reasons to believe otherwise, and that we actually maintained a positive record against other institutions of like profile. The national data supporting this were assiduously compiled by me, and some people were just not interested at looking at it in all that time.

The thing is that the data are the data. Statistics may be used to obfuscate the facts, but there are some data which under any reasonable analysis look good, some which just look bad. Although it has been said that there are 'three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics', it is not necessarily implicit that statistics are more false than lies.

Statistics are still susceptible to careful analysis and have the possibility of truth; a lie is untruth by definition while statistics are only untruthful by implication, and only in this one quotation (for which, we apparently have Benjamin Disraeli and Sam Clemens, to thank). It is of course true that statistics can lie in the application and in the explication as well as the implication, but we as reasonable human beings can attempt to make them lie less or even tell a story that is true enough for honest use.

Twenty years' worth of data, all in my hands. Are these a score to settle scores? Of course not. I would not stoop so low, unless dragged down into the gutter by some of those damned lies. Instead, one might seek to soar instead, above the hurly-burly of the mud-slinging. Then again, as someone said to me, it is good to keep a sharp knife and a sharper wit.