In Class: Logos

While reading chapter 4 in our text, something that stood out to me was the section about statistics and how these numbers can be abused or misinterpreted in many ways while being conveyed to the audience. i always thought that statistics were pretty solid figures to use to support an argument for or against anything. As a neuroscience major and hopefully future psychiatrist, i've taken multiple psychology classes and have learned the many faults of statistics. for instance, the data could be skewed or more focused on a certain aspect or on one side of the argument purely because of the researcher's confounding bias. also, statistics do not always fully consist of all the data truly involved. surveys and polls only make up the percentage of the people that actually took the survey, it does not account for those who did not take the poll, which would make the data inaccurate. today in class our professor brought up the theme of next week, V week i believe, and how it is focused on women abused by their husbands (as well as governmental neglect); these cases are highly difficult to extract a correct statistic from because, for one thing, many of these women that are abused do NOT report it because of fear or a feeling of learned helplessness. in any case, the book just pointed out the fact that cold hard 'facts' are not always what they are cracked up to be and that stood out to me because most people strongly rely on factual evidence when trying to argue their case