In academic field, Data seems to be God that you can be easily persuaded by it. These days , when we are talking about some topics, some students raise data to be evidence. However, at the same time , I wonder is the data here really work? Is this data believable?
The day before, we talked about if gun could be available in some country. When referring to US gun law, Terrence referred to the data given by a gun supporter in US that the death rate of gun crime is lower than the one caused by traffic accident. So it means gun is not dangerous to the society. It’s interesting that people get quiet after this data. But I wonder is this data really mean something? I think, even though the death rate of gun crime is not as high as we thought, but it still adds danger to the society.
Today, a group talked about global warming. They use a temperature record to show that the temperature in recent years keeps rising without any sign of falling back to an previous level. But Dawn raised a very wonderful question that where is data coming from ? I feel people sometimes have gone to extremes by following the truth. We take data as a tool for evidence, which make us feel rational. While, sometimes, we believe data so much that we never take pains to search for the origin and the accuracy. Then, data seems to be a cheater rather than a judge.
Very interesting. We have a saying 'there are lies, damn lies and statistics' which means that you can manipulate statistics/data to prove or say whatever we want. The gun law data was from a gun supporter, so we can't use the data as it is biased and we don't actually know any figures! Gun crime deaths may be lower than traffic accidents, but they could be much higher than knife crime or accidents and the difference between Guns and traffic may only be 0.01%
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Dawn
thx~~U have made things even clear!
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