Even activists debate the strategies and priorities in their social routine. Outsiders fight to turn into insiders, whereas insiders try and maintain them out; the have-nots are looking to get theirs, whereas the haves wish extra. those competing pursuits foster competing claims, and competing claims frequently result in competing information. we should always count on humans to advertise facts that aid their pursuits. This needn't be cheating or cynical. most folks think that their pursuits are valid, that their reason is simply. They grab upon no matter what facts helps their place, they usually element to it with delight and conviction. frequently, this proof is statistical. do not forget that modern society has a tendency to regard numbers with admire; records appear to provide not easy, genuine, undeniable facts. while humans locate numbers that appear to help what they believe—and their interests—they are likely to settle for them. bear in mind bankruptcy 2’s dialogue of the benefit with which activists produce, think in, and justify gigantic estimates for the scale of social difficulties. it truly is in particular tough for many people to imagine severely approximately records that appear to verify what we already think to be real. We could query the definitions, the measurements, or the samples that lie in the back of information provided via our competitors, yet we're much less prone to ask a similar varieties of questions about figures that appear to help our personal positions. Our numbers are definitely sturdy numbers, whereas our competitors’ figures are questionable at most sensible. accurately simply because our society treats data as a strong type of proof, competing pursuits usually result in conflicts over statistics—to stat wars. If one staff bargains facts (“These are proof! ”) to aid its place, its opponents tend to think stressed to discover different numbers that help their pursuits. now and then, debates over whose numbers are extra actual allure media consciousness. this can be dicy. If the media deal with one side’s numbers as right, then that side’s cause—and its interests—will appear to be correct. as the stakes should be nice, stat wars could be very severe, as advocates denounce their competitors’ figures whereas trying to advertise their very own numbers. This bankruptcy examines a few situations of contemporary debates over information. whereas those debates seem to be approximately which numbers are larger, the debaters usually see themselves as protecting not only a statistic, yet vital underlying pursuits or ideas. Stat wars can concentration narrowly at the accuracy of specific numbers or at the most sensible equipment for accumulating statistical information, yet frequently they're just a small a part of a long-standing dispute over a few broader social factor. The instances mentioned during this bankruptcy illustrate a few types of stat wars. Reviewing those circumstances will help us comprehend either the character of those conflicts and the methods we must always reply whilst faced with those dueling figures. DEBATING a selected quantity: DID 1000000 males MARCH? in the summertime of 1995, the kingdom of Islam’s chief, Louis Farrakan, known as for African American males to hitch in a “Million guy March” on October 17, at the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.