"Stats don't lie", but statisticians do, census takers do, assumptions mislead, people are woefully lacking in numeracy...
Taking any numbers or especially their attendant assumptions at face value was always a risky proposition. It's not something new to current circumstances.
Conversation
Feel like every statistical argument should come with one of these Twitter warnings saying "As a human being, you probably don't understand a word of this."
Replying to
There is nothing funny or quirky about this.
Entire sectors of society are built around the ability of a narrow group of people to fudge and misrepresent one of the most notoriously difficult and counterintuitive fields in human science. It's an informational void.
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Not because you can't make good models based on data, not because you can't do good work in statistics, but because the sheer signal/noise-ratio along with blatant and widespread campaigns of disinformation makes the actual quality of conversation on the topic less than 0.