this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Yes. Statistics for example gets politicized all the time, remember when Trump said not to monitor for covid because monitoring it will only find more cases?
Also, possibly the most classic example of misuse of statistics in politics is the assertion of "statistics show black people commit more crimes per capita than white people." When in reality, black people in the West have much lower median incomes than white people due to their long history of facing marginalization and descrimination, and it's income that is correlated to crime, not race. We know this because when you normalize for income, there is no difference in crime rates yet that fallacious statistic gets brought up by racists again and again to justify their racism.