Do not post the same thing in five places. It is super annoying and really stupid.
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics” is mostly a comedic-but-truthful comment on how you can force statistics to say what you want them to say.
The definition is better said on the wikipedia article than I can realistically come up with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is a phrase describing the persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments, “one of the best, and best-known” critiques of applied statistics. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent’s point.
Basically, people want to trust when you offer numbers. But it’s also easy to take any number and massage it to say whatever you want it to say.
For a practical example, Simpson’s Paradox. To summarize it, in 1973, the whole pool of UC Berkeley applicants - if divided only by gender - said that men were more likely to be accepted than women.
But if you divided by the applied department, most of the departments had a higher application acceptance rate for women.
The gap here came about because a huge number of women applied for locations with limited seats - for example, no matter how many applicants the college gets, it can only accept, say, 500 applicants in each department.
If you can take 500 applicants whether you get 1000 or 10,000; then the huge number of applicants that are rejected washes away a lot of the other data when you look at the data at a different angle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
This is an explanation. It is even a plausible one - Hell, I’ll even agree that it’s probable that Terran’s mechanics make it more penalizing when you mess up significantly.
However, it is not a self-evident truth, and it is not a truth that is obviously inferred from the statistics.
Terran players can also be behind for the same reason that Fox is “bad” in Smash Brothers Melee: The probability that the opponent has experience in the matchup is high; and simply having that experience is hugely important for how well you can play it.
Additionally, Terran is the “comfort” race: It’s the one that functions most like what people would call a “standard” RTS race, it’s got a large number of familiar and intuitive functions, they’re also the Humans and there’s a lot of people that will gravitate to the Humans because They Are Human – In my limited world looks, there are almost as many people who will play the Not Humans for the same reason, though! But those “I won’t play Humans” are divided into two groups instead of merged.
Terran players can also be stuck because of the way that their macro can’t be done “hands off” without significant penalty – queuing units is Bad, but designing a playstyle that can macro a different way is easier for the other two races due to the one-click select larva of Zerg and the Warp Gate spammability of Protoss.
Or maybe it’s because Marines are super squishy and die to not much more than a stiff breeze, or the race has a “micro floor” that you don’t really get to below certain ranks.
Or maybe it’s because they see that Terran has Tanks and thinks they should be super defensive and miss part of the point being “attack”. Or maybe literally anything.
The statement –
“When you sort all players into rank-based buckets, while the other races are more flatly distributed, Terran players tend to be less likely to be in Diamond and Platinum leagues.”
is something we can draw from this data and that is reasonable. There’s just a lot of reasons why this could be true; and your data does not support your conclusion unless you assume your conclusion is true and that the reason for that being true is what is stated by this data.
Maybe it’s not harder to learn - Maybe the people that could get to that rank decide “I’m going to play a different race” because they’re just bored playing the Humans.
There are approximately infinitely many explanations; only one of which is your conclusion.