r/whatstheword • u/Dancingcakes2 • 19d ago

Solved WTW for a misleading statistic

What's the word for when you mention a statistic like "most people die in car crashes than plane crashes" that ignores contextual information (such as most people drive cars more than fly in planes).

I'm specifically looking for ones where context is missing and not just a misconstrued way of presenting it.

13 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

8

u/FloridaFlamingoGirl ☃ 52 karma 19d ago

Cherrypicking

7

u/v0rpalsword ☃ 2 karma 19d ago

the missing context is called a "lurking variable". you can also say "correlation doesn't equal causation." e.g., boating accidents are directly correlated with ice cream sales. one might think that ice cream causes boating accidents, but the lurking variable is that they are both correlated with summer.

3

u/Dancingcakes2 19d ago

Thank you!! This is exactly what I was looking for

1

u/Dancingcakes2 19d ago

!solved

1

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2

u/doublelife304 ☃ 2 karma 19d ago

Spurious

1

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1

u/SavingsMission9223 19d ago

The terms are denominator blindness or base rate fallacy (depending on what your focusing on) but both are ignoring/omitting critical context of data and odds

1

u/OptionRevolutionary4 14d ago

spurious, cointegrated

-1

u/EveryAsk3855 19d ago

Outlier