Monday, March 20, 2006
Bird Flu the Coop
There's a statistical lesson in all this renewed talk of bird flu. Is bird flu really spreading? Or are does it just seem that way because we're looking for it and finding it when we weren't before. Perhaps it is only that with all the media attention given to it people are reporting sick birds when they wouldn't have in the past. Maybe it's a little of both. But we can't say without the proper scientific research to verify it that bird flu is actually spreading.
Offer an anonymous $10,000 reward for turning in pot growers and you can be certain that quite suddenly it would seem as if there's a heck of a lot more pot being grown than ever was realized. Offer a grand each in cash for unregistered handguns and see how money guns will come out of the woodwork like roaches. After 9/11 terrorists were everywhere we looked. Any one slightly Middle Eastern looking was a suspicious character. Ryan White and the aids scare of the 80s took some of the fun out of my teen years. Make something scary or profitable enough and the statistics will be altered.
Just because we find bird flu in the U.S. doesn't mean it wasn't already here.
We see similar logical errors in market analysis all the time. The brain drain fallacy I wrote about in
Gross Sales is one example.
posted at 4:21 PM
