Statistical Lies

"There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics"--attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Marshall, Mark Twain and many other dead people. According to the December 30, 2005, edition of The Writer's Almanac, Rudyard Kipling

was once sent to school with a sign on his back that said, "Liar." He later said, "That made me pay attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort."

And Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox says about One Billion Internet Users :

Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don't know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on. Statistically, we're likely talking about a 24-year-old woman in Shanghai.

So is it a lie to say the billionth user is a female, Chinese, twenty-something? Statistically speaking? Virtually, yes and no (pun intended). I suspect Nielsen was not using a statistical measure at all, but the fact that the most new users were, at the time he wrote, young women in China. He wasn't speaking statistically at all, but trend-wise, citing an example of the cutting edge.

[writing]