Blindly. People love to list them as evidence as if the numbers stand on their own. Reality is a person had some hand in assembling the numbers and there is no such thing as a bulletproof statistic. Good statistics ought to be scrutinized.

…as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.

The question makes me remember Daryl Bem, a celebrated social psychologist. He published a much cited article called “Writing the Empirical Journal Article”. About 15 years ago, he used this advice to prove that humans can see into the future. His advice is probably still used to teach. That’s probably the worst thing you can do.

Averages. They’re almost always a bullshit flag if it’s tied to anything remotely political. If you’re not going to also give the standard deviation and skew then at least use median.

Well, to immanetize the eschaton. That’s the worst thing to do with statistics.

To cherry pick it and use it to promote fascist views

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Truncated graphs. I hate them but they are so often (ab)used, even in professional situations.

I once saw a reddit post where some busybody counted how many people with dogs walked by in an hour and multiplied that by 24 and assumed that was how many walked by in a day (as if it would be the same amount at all times of day)

Lying

When you mix statistics with marketing.

Not making sure the result even makes sense. There was a real example, where a ~2010 news article said that the number of crimes in their city has been doubling every year since ~1980.

That is not possible. Assume that there was one crime in 1980. In 2010, there must be at least 2^20 crimes.

Eugenics

White people are shot more by cops proving there is no police brutality against people of color.

(No, this isn’t my actual opinion. This is an arguement racists use and white suprimists)

More men are arrested for crime than women, proving that cops are sexist.

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