A bit of healthy scientific skepticism or logical reasoning with some skills to evaluate sources of evidence and biases help with both understanding quoted stats, and liars and the ill-informed.
It’s a difficult and time consuming skill to learn and use though.
Even a small amount of statistic abuse will break blind trust in them. Once that trust is gone, some people will reject all of them, rather than try and differentiate.
Low grade abuse of statistics and related methods is rampant in low grade media.
I think statistically (pun intended) there are more problems with people ignoring statistics or plain lying, than statistics being abused
A bit of healthy scientific skepticism or logical reasoning with some skills to evaluate sources of evidence and biases help with both understanding quoted stats, and liars and the ill-informed.
It’s a difficult and time consuming skill to learn and use though.
Even a small amount of statistic abuse will break blind trust in them. Once that trust is gone, some people will reject all of them, rather than try and differentiate.
Low grade abuse of statistics and related methods is rampant in low grade media.