Statistics and Islamic Terrorists

An English statesman named Benjamin Disraeli once said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."; Truer words have seldom been spoken. 

(On the other hand, Jude 1:10 of The Bible said something about 'irrational animals' slandering whatever they do not understand. I feel when it comes to statistics as a whole, it's a combination of both.)

Today, I had my end-semester exam on Statistics. For reasons mentioned previously in my bulletins, I wasn't able to study anything and I was completely clueless about the subject. 

(In case you're not in the know, I had a second course I was paying more attention to so college ended up going by the board.) 

I went for the exam, my only experience with the subject being me reading the entire book once, last week. As you can imagine, this level of preparation is not quite optimal for a subject that primarily involves mathematical formulae and solving mathematical questions via the aforementioned formulae.

Fortunately, the question paper wasn't really that difficult. It looked like the overlords took pity on our pathetic souls and gave us a question paper with a balance of theory questions and mathematical questions so even a person who put even the slightest effort into the content could easily pass. 

Unfortunately, I was too far under-prepared and not even the mercy of the examiners could save me from the consequences of my (lack of) actions. 

I just decided to solve the math to whatever extent I could and throw all of the theory I could think of onto the answer sheet. All in all, I am quite certain I'll be repeating this subject next semester, which was to be expected. 

One of the byproducts of this abysmal exam attempt was a 'funny moment' that I will share with you now, This is where the Islamic Terrorists enter the equation.

One of the questions was worth 10 marks, to explain the concept of Forecasting. I took advantage of the vagueness of the question and answered with an unnecessarily long, about 500-600 word essay. 

It was mostly just me rephrasing the same thing over and over again while I kept emphasizing my own agenda for some reason, which was "Statistics are not very reliable so don't be over-dependent on them."

Now I don't remember exactly what I wrote but the following is an excerpt of the answer.

"...Of course, one should bear in mind that forecasting can never be completely accurate. Despite our current level of technology, we still can not account for every single factor that could affect or alter the outcome of an event..."

"...An example of this would be the trends of The American Stock Exchange in September of 2001. It started out quite normally, the projections and forecasts looked perfectly fine. No amount of mathematical forecasting with linear regressions or moving averages based on past market trends could account for a market crash as a result of Islamic Terrorists crashing multiple aircraft into the World Trade Center..."

I am not quite sure why I did this.