Using percentages incorrectly
Discussion
brianmorrison said:
It's the hair ads. 74% of 135 people love our product....
Better than it used to be. Not so long ago, they wouldn't have told you the sample size and people thought that 74% of the whole population loved the product.It gets interesting trying to explain to people how a sample size of 1000 can be used to represent a whole population of 30,000,000 with an error of +/-3%, 95% of the time
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amancalledrob said:
My thread has arrived
I work in private medical insurance. No claims discounts are a nightmare - eg member has 50% NCD. Makes claim. NCD goes down to 35%. Member's premium was £100 and now it's £130, member wants to know why their premium appears to have increased 30%. Well, it hasn't. It's gone up 15%.
Try explaining that to a militant 65yo housewife.
This post proves that there a 3 types of people, those who can count and those who can't. I work in private medical insurance. No claims discounts are a nightmare - eg member has 50% NCD. Makes claim. NCD goes down to 35%. Member's premium was £100 and now it's £130, member wants to know why their premium appears to have increased 30%. Well, it hasn't. It's gone up 15%.
Try explaining that to a militant 65yo housewife.
brianmorrison said:
It's the hair ads. 74% of 135 people love our product....
I love the way they make things like this sound good. To me a 26% failure rate isn't something to be advertised.There was a program on Dave a few months back - Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Good-ish. He spoke about this very thing.
He even showed a cosmetic ad that trumpeted some market research that read '23 out of 60 women agree that it had a positive effect'........and he made the very valid point that - in other words - more people thought it didn't work than did
amancalledrob said:
My thread has arrived
I work in private medical insurance. No claims discounts are a nightmare - eg member has 50% NCD. Makes claim. NCD goes down to 35%. Member's premium was £100 and now it's £130, member wants to know why their premium appears to have increased 30%. Well, it hasn't. It's gone up 15%.
Try explaining that to a militant 65yo housewife.
Boils my piss. Grinds my gears. All manner of other PH-specific clichés too
It has gone up 30%. The customer's baseline is £100, so the comparison is done against that.I work in private medical insurance. No claims discounts are a nightmare - eg member has 50% NCD. Makes claim. NCD goes down to 35%. Member's premium was £100 and now it's £130, member wants to know why their premium appears to have increased 30%. Well, it hasn't. It's gone up 15%.
Try explaining that to a militant 65yo housewife.
Boils my piss. Grinds my gears. All manner of other PH-specific clichés too
What gets me is when people try take averages of percentages - "Group A is 60% and group B is 90%, so the average of both groups together is 75%."
"Unfortunately dumbass, group A contains 2000 {objects} and group B contains 50 {objects}, so the average is 60.7%."
My wife's an accountant, she's going to tear me a new one when she sees this. She's thought she's the only one who's had to listen to my objections over the years, now I've found other like minded individuals (victims) , I shall gladly point out this ever growing thread in my defence
xRIEx said:
What gets me is when people try take averages of percentages - "Group A is 60% and group B is 90%, so the average of both groups together is 75%."
"Unfortunately dumbass, group A contains 2000 {objects} and group B contains 50 {objects}, so the average is 60.7%."
The mean is 60.7% "Unfortunately dumbass, group A contains 2000 {objects} and group B contains 50 {objects}, so the average is 60.7%."
Years and years ago, I worked in the statistics office at BT. Some of the reports which went out contained stats aggregated at different levels. It wasn't uncommon to get some irate manager calling to tell me that my figures were wrong - he had averaged the averages for the (different sized) teams beneath him and they didn't come to the same as the overall average we had calculated for all his staff.
amancalledrob said:
My thread has arrived
I work in private medical insurance. No claims discounts are a nightmare - eg member has 50% NCD. Makes claim. NCD goes down to 35%. Member's premium was £100 and now it's £130, member wants to know why their premium appears to have increased 30%. Well, it hasn't. It's gone up 15%.
Try explaining that to a militant 65yo housewife.
Boils my piss. Grinds my gears. All manner of other PH-specific clichés too
But the customer is looking at it from her perspective - the price she was given to take the policy out has gone up by 30% (and is correct) I work in private medical insurance. No claims discounts are a nightmare - eg member has 50% NCD. Makes claim. NCD goes down to 35%. Member's premium was £100 and now it's £130, member wants to know why their premium appears to have increased 30%. Well, it hasn't. It's gone up 15%.
Try explaining that to a militant 65yo housewife.
Boils my piss. Grinds my gears. All manner of other PH-specific clichés too
The insurer is looking at it as the "premium" and looking at discounts applied to original policy.
Bit misleading if you ask me. No one cares what discount has been applied only the price they pay
Hate it when someone refers to something over 100% in effort (ie I'll give it 200% bull) but there are something's you can go over 100 such as shares/salary etc)
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