Comment by ForHackernews
4 hours ago
> Something can be simultaneously "misleading" and either true or false.
Sure they can. It might be a true fact that "100% of the murders committed in <town> over the last 25 years were committed by <some racial group>!" but actually it's a town of 750 people and there was only one murder during that time frame.
how is that misleading if it's a fact, it's only misleading if you presume to know the reaction or intent behind making such a claim, and without context we should be extremely careful in making such presumptions.
It's misleading because a single murder in this case is not statistically significant, but phrasing it using probabilistic terminology (i.e. percentages) obscures that fact and implies that you have enough data for the probabilistic language to be relevant.
Choosing to use percentages when there is a countable or small amount of data is typically misleading, even though it is "technically" true. In fact, a misleading statement is almost always something that is technically a fact.