Numbers do not lie,

...humans do!

It amazes me.  So often all it takes for people to believe a sentence and statement one makes, is to just plot a graph, put some captions around it, and claim a conclusion.  Many people immediately like or accept that statement as a fact, even when the plot has no captions for the horizontal and vertical axises, even when they do not know what the data points they are looking at are.

A few may ask questions about the data, its meaning, and source and some be satisfied with the results, but yet only a few go far enough without giving up to reveal the flaws or even just to understand them.

It saddens me that sometimes scientists choose to look at the data the way it helps them make their case.

For example, I saw a support letter a scientist wrote in support of some summer educational program, which is good to support do not get me wrong.  She said, last year we had X number of positions in  field Y which were not filled, and it clearly shows a shortage of students in  field Y.  She fails to see that a few of those X number of positions had more than X number of applicants in field Y.  That those applicants could easily be pointed to those positions that were not filled.  That this fact does not signal a shortage necessarily, rather those other positions being offered late after all summer students had planned their summer elsewhere, that maybe those positioned were not advertised well, maybe Human Resources did not act on them in a timely manner and a million other things.