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Overheard a data guy say 'confidence intervals are just vibes' and now I'm worried
I was at a coffee shop Tuesday and caught two guys arguing over a laptop. One of them worked for some news site and he said they just pick a plus or minus number that makes their claim look good. He literally said 'confidence intervals are just vibes, we round until it fits the headline.' I've been thinking about that all week. How many viral polls or political stats have I shared without checking the margin of error? That 3% they slap on there might be total guesswork. Has anyone else seen this kind of thing in the wild or caught a stat claim that felt off after looking at the confidence window?
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kellygrant2mo ago
You ever check how they're actually calculating that margin before you share it? Most of the time its just guesswork dressed up in math.
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mark_green2mo ago
oh man you are SO right. i was looking at this one crypto "analysis" page and they had this huge spreadsheet with all these formulas and fancy charts. turns out half the numbers were just pulled from some random twitter thread and the rest was them guessing what the market would do next week. i even found one cell that was literally hardcoded as "idk lol" before they slapped a nice looking graph over it. it's all just vibes when you peel back the label.
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evan5432mo ago
Have you ever noticed how half the time these numbers are just the smallest possible range that doesn't make them look stupid, @mark_green? I once watched a guy cut his confidence interval in half just by deleting a few outlier data points, called it "cleaning the dataset.
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