You’ve seen them. It’s those “news” stories where a “scientist” says they have calculated the best/worst movie/holiday/starbucks coffee/fruit/travel destination. And these articles always, always, always have two features:
1) the best/worst is always the product of the sponsor/sponsor’s competitor, and
2) there is always some bogus math formula which makes it look all official and science-y.
At Apathy Sketchpad you can find formulas to compute the best sitcom, the perfect joke, or how to pour gravy.
Besides being absurd, news articles treating these as serious science only serve to cloud the everyday person’s idea of what real science is all about. This leaves people believing in all sorts of pseudoscience, and gives them the idea that taxpayers money on research is being wasted on drivel like this.
People get really worked up about this abuse of math and science. Simon Singh is sponsoring a contest to find the worst example of this kind of formula (makes you wonder if he’ll come up with a formula to calculate the worst one 
). And Ben Goldacre has taken the time to point out that if you look at units, then some of these formulas are automatically pure nonsense! And as Nikola Petrov told us a couple of weeks ago, you should pay attention to your units!
It's magic!
(Thanks to Dr. Goodey for pointing out Simon Singh’s article)
This is a funny post!!!! Math can never be abused though!!!! lol…. People need to use more math in their daily habits!!!
This is exactly the trick I use to fool my friends into thinking my way. Throw in some variables, quantify things that can’t be quantified, and always ALWAYS sound like you know what you’re talking about. Knowing enough math to know how to make the fake stuff sound real is a great skill. This is a sure way to be persuasive.
Patrick,
Of course, officially, we must condone your use of math abuse for glory and power. But unofficially….
It seems that lately people are craving some sort of hard-lined definition for everything around them. Unfortunately, far too many are too lazy to develop them for themselves or even review those developed by others. We joke about how people create formulas for sitcoms, but under-developed and under-reviewed formulas and notions are working their way into everything. It leads to things like bad investments and bad software. The only way to keep this trend at bay is to review such things ourselves, publicly reject bogus notions, and help keep others from becoming what I call “headline readers” through education. I truly believe a healthy skepticism of the ever growing pool of too-good-to-be-true mathematical oversimplifications (and their pushers) is a must these days.
Mark,
Agreed! And the media has a responsibility to be more critical about the stories they choose to report. Remember the news stories about how the LHC was going to make a black hole which would destroy the planet? Only the Daily Show gave the story the seriousness it deserved.
A little verbal slip there, U. of Oklahoma Math Club…”condone”…the math police are onto you.
Honestly, when the stories are as absurd as this, it doesn’t bother me at all. It’s the more insidious bad-science stories that disturb me, like the all-too-common fluff piece written by biological determinists on experimentally observed differences between the sexes, or that thing a while back in the bbc about hot coffee making people nicer. Sometimes bad math serves as a beacon of obvious-falseness that we should be grateful for. When there’s no math at all, it can be easier to be fooled.
Adrian,
Good Catch!