Today, somebody yelled at me simply for sharing a statistic. That statistic wasn't my "opinion," is was a set of cold hard numbers: This many people died of this cause, in this year... blah, blah, blah.

I think that quite often opinions can be expressed as statistics - they can convey different opinions based on what data sets one wants to include, how the data sets are presented, etc.

Our national news service had an article some few days ago on the anti-socialist movement in the US. Recently the white house released a report "The Opportunity Costs of Socialism. I haven't had time to read the report itself, just the critique from our national news service - of course I can believe the claim that the standards of living in the US is much higher than in the socialist Nordic countries is quite a trigger for many employees and bosses at our national broadcast service.

One of the statistics presented in the article is that the yearly cost of owning a Ford Ranger compared to the average salary would be 4.4 working hours in the US versus 7 working hours in Norway and 12 working hours in Finland. I have no doubts it's true - but presenting statistics in this way is nothing more than an opinion. The article boringly points out that the "average salary" in the US is a meaningless measure because it's very much affected by a small part of the population having extremely high salaries. I'd go a bit further: I'm quite sure that if one had exchanged the Ford Ranger with a Tesla Model X , and exchanged the "average salary" with "median salary", one could easily conclude that it sucks to live in the US. (And, actually, both cars are produced in the US. Just because of that they should be cheaper to purchase and maintain in the US than in Norway. Perhaps public transport would be a more fair thing to compare - I do believe that getting from one arbitrary point in a small (Oslo-sized) city to another is both cheaper and easier in Norway than in the US. Except, an "arbitrary point" in Oslo would easily end up being in the sea or in the deep forest).

And that's of course the way to tackle "statistical opinions". I believe it's a typical American thing to get angry and upset and use words like "unpatriotic" when being confronted with statistics :-)