"...% of statistics are made up on the spot"

[Jeff Prucher]

Google Groups has a couple pre-1990 posts with a version in the sig line; the
earlist is on 11/5/1987:

"17.82 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot."

There's also a post from 3/21/86 with the different, but related, thought that
"43% of all statistics are worthless."

Jeff Prucher


--- Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU> wrote:
>
> Here is a minor comment on a minor subject. Add the disclaimer that I know
> that memory can be mistaken. (If there are pre-1990 citations, I'll be
> mistaken.) And, this is not a case of origins that matters a lot to me
> (unlike, say, "Essenes," from a Hebrew root, 'asah, attested in some Qumran
> mss in self-designation; you may have noticed news articles attempting, with
> poor reason, to separate Qumran and Essenes).
>
> Nonetheless, I do think that I made up this phrase; I used it in several
> classes, as a joke, but also to see if they were paying attention. In the
> 1990s, at Duke, NC State, UNC-Wilmington and Chapel Hill, Meredith, Wake
> Forest--that's where I taught, though my use may have been only at the first
> three of them. It was picked up, for some reason, on a Duke student election
> flyer.
>
> I mention this because I heard Geoff Nunberg on "Fresh Air" yesterday. He
> used
> a version, saying something like: ...the well-known fact that 88.2% of all
> statistics are made up on the spot. I used to say (most of the time) 42.7%,
> and then "correct" to 47.2%, (or vice versa), of all statistics are made up
> on
> the spot.
>
> Stephen Goranson
>




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