Statistics of course! Thomas Sowell has a great column on the use of statistics to bolster a preconception. The master sez:
Too many people in the media, in academia, and even in courts of law, act as if numbers plus a preconception equals proof. The preconception is that various groups -- by race, sex, or whatever -- would be evenly represented in occupations or institutions if it were not for discrimination.There is no evidence for this notion -- and tons of evidence against it, from countries around the world.
American men are struck by lightning six times as often as American women. Who is discriminating? Men are just 54 percent of the labor force but they suffer more than 90 percent of all deaths on the job. Discrimination?
[...]
One of the reasons given by Earl Warren for supporting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was that they lived clustered around military bases to an extent that greatly exceeded what could be accounted for by random chance.
If you start with the preconception that Japanese Americans were likely to try to sabotage the American war effort against Japan and then add a statistical anomaly, you are following the same procedure that leads in many other situations to the grand fallacy that preconception plus numbers equals proof.
In reality, the Japanese Americans, who were largely farmers in those days, lived where they did for the same reason that the military built bases there: The land was cheap. In fact, the Japanese Americans were there first and the military then came in and built bases in their midst.
Moore and his followers live on Sowell's dictum: "It is so easy to go so wrong when numbers are added to preconceptions."
"Well, we went to war and Halliburton made $36 million dollars" is Quod Erat Demonstratum to my niece and a lot of my left wing friends. Occam's Razor is not an intellectual foundation for this crowd.