12 is the meaningless number

I was recently shown some data about levels of consumer trust in various companies, institutions and information sources. One of the findings was that 12% of people believe what they read on blogs.

Hmmm.

Does that mean that 88% of the people reading this post think I made that statistic up?

What if I tell you that 2+2=5? How many readers believe that?

Surely the truth is that most people believe some of the stuff they read on blogs some of the time and the problem with a question as dumb as the one that yielded that finding is it tells us nothing at all.

Anyone got any more dumb questions they'd like to submit? (And that one doesn't count.)

Comments

[Whatever]

To demonstrate the point, here is a letter that appeared in The Times:

To the Times,

So 65% of divorces after the age of 50 are initiated by women, and this statistic is used to disprove the assumption that late-in-life divorces are caused by unfaithful men leaving their ageing wives for younger women. What nonsense. The statistic alone proves nothing without a record of the reasons why so many older women, chubby or not, divorce their men. Quite true that I initiated my divorce after 29 years of marriage, and aged 50, but only because the b******d had taken up with a younger and thinner woman.
Ruth Hayward, London, SE14

[TMR]

Surely we all know that statistics can be made to say anything that we want them to - whether they appear on a blog, in a newspaper or on a cereal box is irrelevant...

I know David Ogilvy said that "the consumer is not stupid - she is your wife", but my grandmother used to say that "the problem with common sense is that it is not very common"...

So there.