statistics

One of the nice features of the Cowriters.app is that it shows some nice statistics on your profile. Along the obvious streak length and post count there is also the total count of words written across all those posts.

Mine shows 129137 after yesterdays post. That's a lot of words. Quick googling gives 90000 words as an average word count of a book. So that's already almost halfway to a second book.

After the 200 word limit was dropped I decided to loosen my own targets as well. Before, I tried to keep also as close as possible from the upper bound to 200 words, not just keeping it as minimum. Back then I rarely wrote more than 250 words.

Now it had been a while with the new rules. Looking back there has been a few posts a bit below 150 words and few more below the magic 200. But what's interesting that there has been lot more of those 250 plus posts, multiple posts over 300 words, even a couple of post with over 400 words.

While the epidemic is ravaging around the world we, the lucky ones not yet touched by it must live through the statistics of it. Until it touches someone close enough to you it's just all numbers.

There are all those first cases and deaths: in the world, in your continent, country, city. It's getting closer, numbers are getting bigger. All that matters are those smallest numbers. The ones closest to you.

We see statistics everywhere. They are used to justify our actions. They promise better futures, or proof our assumptions. 

But 73,6% of all statistics are made up. It's hard to trust those numbers when you know the truth. Yet still, they are guiding our lives.

Sure, those numbers always come from somewhere. But knowing the whole process, the whole truth behind the numbers they don't actually tell you that much. For example what was the target group, in which context was the numbers collected or how does the result compare to other information.