At a recent set of focus groups —  you know where a small group of subjects is quizzed on a particular subject while being scrutinized through one-way glass by a smaller group of people hoping for insight that can be extrapolated across thousands — I heard confusion arise.  The facilitator said: “6 cents in every 100 dollars,” but it kept being played back as “6 percent in every 100 dollars.”

Big difference.  How come?  For nearly 60 years we have seen the meaning of numbers and percentages overtaken by the importance of the argument they are used to promote.  The focus group insight is: we are all guilty.  One reason may be how the apparent objectivity of numbers lends credibility to any argument no matter how contorted the equation that produced them.

Go back to 1954, when Darrell Huff and Irving Geis published “How to Lie with Statistics.” It kicked off a trend of adding math to marketing.

Here is how the book opened:

“‘There’s a mighty lot of crime around here,’ said my father-in law a little while after he moved from Iowa to California.  And so there was — in the newspaper he read.  It is one that overlooks no crime in its own area and has been known to give more attention to an Iowa murder than was given by the principal daily in the region in which it took place.

“My father-in-law’s conclusion was statistical in an informal way.  It was based on a sample, a remarkably biased one. Like many a more sophisticated statistic it was guilty of semiattachment: It assumed that newspaper space given to crime reporting is a measure of a crime rate.”

Guarding against the urge to confer credibility on every random column of numbers that “foot” — add up correctly — puts a burden of all of our five senses.  If extra sensory perception is the ability to see things without evidence or experience, it may take that sixth one to protect us from ourselves.