{"id":5173,"date":"2012-08-25T00:35:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T07:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/?p=5173"},"modified":"2012-08-25T00:32:28","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T07:32:28","slug":"how-to-lie-with-statistics-philips-airfloss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/25\/how-to-lie-with-statistics-philips-airfloss\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Lie with Statistics: Philips AirFloss"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The new Philips Sonicar AirFloss looks cool and they claim that it “removes up to 99% more plaque compared to regular brushing<\/a>“, wow! 99%, that’s amazi…. wait a minute!<\/p>\n

Let’s give that sentence another go. \u00a0“…up to 99% more…”So for instance, if you have 100 “plaques” in your mouth and brushing gets rid of just 20 of them, will AirFloss get rid of 99 of the plaques… leaving just 1 nasty plaque? No it does not<\/strong>. It gets rid of 99% more<\/strong> than brushing. In my example, about 19 more plaques than brushing alone for a total of 39… or in reasonable terms “almost twice as much”. Apparently that fine statistic wasn’t good enough for Phillips America. The fact that they chose to say “99% more” instead of “100% more” or “twice as much” demonstrates that they were trying to deceive. “99% more” is simply an unreasonable claim any way you slice it. \u00a0I am disappointed in Philips.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Now I’m not calling the Philips marketeers fucking liars, I’m just saying that trying to pull a fast one like that is deceptive, immoral and against the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines. (Amazon.com listing)<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new Philips Sonicar AirFloss looks cool and they claim that it “removes up to 99% more plaque compared to regular brushing“, wow! 99%, that’s amazi…. wait a minute! Let’s give that sentence another go. \u00a0“…up to 99% more…”So for instance, if you have 100 “plaques” in your mouth and brushing gets rid of just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poor-design-workshop","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}