Learning Stats at UofT #8: Problems in Statistics Application

This is the eighth post of the series Learning Stats at UofT. In case you did not read my last post, here is the introudction.

The fundamental statistics courses at UofT are normally unchanged, at least from my experience in the past three years. Still, I think it is worth devoting some blogs to this topic. Before starting the introduction to courses, I would like to spend some time on discussing statistics.

Now it’s approaching the end of semester for me. To reflect back on the past 2020, a lot of things were going on and everyone had a tough time. It was also the time to develop skills to collaborate virtually and be compassionate about other people in workplaces around the world.

In a data driven world, we are connected by data and the study of data, statistics, is very essential to our day to day life. However, the abuse of statistics also created problems for us.

Misspecified Models

At the early stage of the pandemic, people proposed many models to predict the number of cases around the world. Some even argued that the cases would grow exponentially. This was based on their past experience with virus spread. However, this was a very unreasonable guess because there was no up-to-date evidence to support this. this created some rumors and pessimistic expectations on our world. In fact, this could be avoided if the posters were more cautious about what they were going to say and the implications. But they were not. Statistics became a tool to spread rumors, and readers should be more critical towards such models. We statisticians have the responsibility to stand out and correct this mistake.

Data Exploration

New data were released every day from the government. The data analysis should be the job of data analyst. However, many people who had no such backgrounds also spread their ideas on the internet. It was not that harmful if they were accidentally correct. However, some people enjoyed playing around with data and sharing some false conclusion based on them. Hence I see the necessity for a general education about statistics for the public.