Statistics make great hooks to draw in an audience. LinkedIn posters know this. Though they don’t seem to be too concerned about supporting those statistics with sources. Whenever I see strong claims backed by stats with no source data, I immediately become skeptical of its validity.
Here are two recent examples that stood out:
“80% of managers fail in the first six months.”
- What’s failure? Getting fired? Sending an email with a typo?
- Where is this data from? Did you survey managers?
“AI consumes two gallons of water for every 100 words produced”
- Where’s this data from?
- What model? What type of workload?
- Are you including energy costs to manufacture GPUs and build data centers?
If you want your stats to be believable and not just attention catching, back them up with sources and details.