PIDOOMA
PIDOOMA is an acronym for Pulled It Directly Out Of My Ass. Synonyms: colonic autoextraction methodology, toilet fishing. This is a self-explanatory origin for woo and pseudoscience statistics, estimates, theories and, fairly often, evidence too.
A quoted statistic that is a neat multiple of 5 should generally be suspected to be of PIDOOMA provenance, because after all, 88.2% of statistics are made up.[1] Similarly, statistics or results quoted to odd precision are also suspect as they are an example of "spurious rigor". That is, the addition of significant figures or more decimal places are used to make the figure seem more accurate and reliable, when in fact such precision is rarely justifiable. An improvement of 82.56% is probably (with a confidence of either 95% or 92.56584%) no real improvement at all.
It is the method generally used for the generation of Schlafly Statistics.
See also
- Argumentum ex culo
- PIOOSEA, or Pull It Out Of Someone Else's Ass
Footnotes
- ↑ Reeves; Guinness (1997)