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Notes -
Bad data, or deliberate bending of facts?
I was looking into literacy rates and came across this article. Couple surprising things, like how my home state of California has the lowest literacy rate, or literacy for US adults is only at 79%. Normally I'd look into exactly how they defined literacy, but at the bottom of the article it says this:
The numbers seemed clearly wrong to me, so I looked through all the referenced sources and couldn't find anything. I did more searching and found this article which has the inverse numbers:
Some of the more data savvy of you may interpret this data correctly, but the chart in the article and the addition of the data in the 3rd column makes it extremely easy to interpret the wrong way.
I used these numbers and eventually I was able to find the source, an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. If you look at figure 3, it becomes very clear that it's not 35% of whites that are illiterate, it's 35% of the illterate population that is white.
This isn't a data point that has gone viral or anything, but I can see someone doing casual research online can easily come to the wrong conclusion. The first article is completely wrong, the 2nd article has the correct data but presents it in an extremely horrible way, and the actual source has a very easy to understand graph.
I'm being a bit tongue in cheek with the question, I don't think anyone deliberately misrepresented data in order to make it seem like whites are doing worse than African Americans. But someone took the effort to create a new graph with the source data, and then someone else took it further and inversed those numbers to present the conclusion in a different way. And these authors aren't idiots, both of them are CEOs of their respective companies and have an education in a college/university.
But why, if you're the author of the 2nd article, would you turn a stacked bar chart into a freaking column chart, when a pie chart would have been the obvious go to? Perhaps he was trying to add in the data about non American born into a single chart, but in the process ended up creating a really bad chart. And the author of the 1st article, he's the only one with the inversed data I could find, so I'm pretty certain he deliberately inversed that data. How could you look at conclusion and not even question if those facts were true, then go actually publish it for the world to see? I realize these are not academic articles and are pieces to pull traffic into their website, but shouldn't you take some level of effort to make sure the information you present to the world to see is accurate, valid, and easy to understand?
So much of the culture war these days seem to be around if some event is even true or not, and if people can't even get information about literacy correct, imagine how easy it is for a malicious actor to not even make up data, just misrepresent data to push an agenda or perspective. Then this information goes on tiktok videos with absolutely no sources for millions to see. At least X's community post has been a way to combat misinformation, does tiktok have anything similar?
By the way, if anyone knows the exact name of the type of chart in figure 3 here I'd appreciate it.
this feels similar to the claim that “Black Women are the Most Educated Group in USA”, when actually the stat is taken from the fact that among their own racial group, black women earn a disproportionate % of post-grad degrees. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1720190597045100626?s=20
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