Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1041944
27 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 21 OCTOBER 2018 OPINION We try to draw specif ic conclusions from facts and f igures that have only global – as opposed to individual – application how 'drinking black coffee may turn you into a psycho- path'… because a statistical study concluded that most known psychopaths take their coffee black. (Yeah, but what about all those psychopaths we don't know about, who prefer their coffee with milk? Not to mention the millions of people out there who also drink black coffee, but never quite progress to the stage of burying their dismembered victims under the kitchen tiles?) But I won't bother, because the underlying illogicality tends to always be the same. We apply micro- reasoning to a macro scenario. We try to draw specific conclu- sions from facts and figures that have only global – as opposed to individual – ap- plication. To conclude with a local ex- ample (arbitrarily, I admit: on another occasion it might have been one of our own surveys… or at least, our newspaper's interpretation of its own statis- tics), take Lovin' Malta's most recent poll. The headline is 'If you voted Nationalist, you are four times more likely to believe that gov- ernment was behind Daphne's murder' (to which my immedi- ate response was identical to the choice between horses and sharks, above: gee, who would have ever guessed?). But in this case, it is the figures them- selves that strike me as curious. It seems, for instance, that 94.4% of Nationalist voters in the last election believe that 'Government was behind Daphne's murder': leaving, as far as I can see, room for only 5.6% to think otherwise. And yet, somehow, another 72.2% think it was 'a local crime or- ganisation' (OK, perhaps they were sarcastically referring to the same government); 55.6%, a 'foreign crime organisation'; 38.9%, a 'foreign government'; and – wait for it – 22%, 'The Opposition'. Huh? What? For starters, the grand total of all those cat- egories – including the 11.1% who answered 'none of the above' – adds up to a stagger- ing 294.4%: making you sort of wonder how the PN managed to lose the last election, with the support of almost three times as many voters as the laws of mathematics actually permit. But let's close an eye at that anomaly. There could, after all, be a perfectly rational explanation: it may have been a multiple-choice scenario. Even so however: how can 94.4% of PN voters believe it was the government, while 22.2% – of the same pool of voters, please note – think it was the Opposition? How can there not be an overlap between those two, entirely contradictory positions? OK, like I said earlier… I've never really understood statis- tics, so maybe I've just made a fool of myself by asking those questions. But as far as I can make out, it can only mean that around 16.6% of people who voted Nationalist in the last election think that both Government AND the Opposition were behind the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Which is either mathematically flawed, or else patently… … Hold on a minute: now that I've actually thought about it for a second or two… who knows? Maybe Lovin Malta's survey is more accurate than I gave it credit for. Maybe that 16.6% really is onto something there....