Quote Originally Posted by seireikhaan View Post
Not at all. If that were the point, why do businesses utilize statistics so much? They need to know who to market a product to, where to market it to, where to expand, how they are perceived, etc... Not, of course, that statistics can't be used to draw false conclusions- however, this tends to be much more out of political or cultural convictions, not out of any fault of the statistic. Again, a statistic is just a number- what you draw from it is what's truly important.
I can't help but feel we are arguing around each other... yet, there are most certainly ways that statistics can be made completely useless and redundant - by way of providing information about a product/person that is misleading then trying to draw an opinion about that. Look at just about any internet poll that links to a damning story for an example of this.