Wack Data

A friend posted this image on Facebook http://i.imgur.com/JWYXr.png

It's an infographic, source unknown, purportedly showing a correlation between the "religiousness" of the states of the U.S.A. and various other vectors associated with standard of living, intelligence etc.

He posted it with the tag "The results are unsurprising". Well, sure. It looks to me like the graphic's creator has used various techniques to manipulate perception of the data. The use of colour is the most obvious. You can barely look at the table without the colour screaming at you. I have no doubt that the colour scheme is consistent, but it does have a tendency to draw the eye in directions that it wouldn't go if it were pure text data.

It's obvious that religion is on the agenda for the creator. For one, the left most column is the religion column (entirely undefined, of course), and the whole table is sorted from highest to lowest according to that column. With this in mind, it's difficult to take anything about the data at face value.

I am not a religious person. I was raised Catholic, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that it doesn't inform my morality or decision making. But that's as far as it goes. I don't allow it to define my existence the way modern Christians do, is what I'm saying. I don't feel the need to defend it or attack it. It simply is.

But I do have issue with using data and alleged science to attack any institution, when the data has been manipulated to such a degree that you can't even garnish anything useful from it. This data in particular seems to have been put together specifically to correlate religion and crime rates. It's notably lacking several vectors which I believe would have a greater influence on crime and intelligence quotient. Population density, schools per capita, law enforcement officials per capita, even state spending on crime and education would all be more interesting data points to look at than "religiousness".

As it is, this is fit for tabloids, but it's frankly embarrassing to use to prove a point about religion.