There’s two kinds of people in the world: those that don’t understand statistics and draw the wrong conclusions themselves, those that don’t understand statistics and unknowingly misrepresent it to others, and those that understand statistics and misrepresent it to others for personal gain. The last group is statistically insignificant.

Statistics do not lie, but people do not generally understand it. Which is fair, because statistics is not that easy to do, and it’s very easy to fool oneself if you’re not very careful. It’s worse that (especially) journalists focus on headlines instead of understanding statistics, therefore unknowingly misrepresenting polls and research. At the same time, many researchers do not get statistics either, and draw wrong conclusions or non-existing correlations.