Fairly sure the previous poster is describing statistics that were made up, rather than measured/sampled. Those are, for hopefully obvious reasons, not very trustworthy

so, the actual lesson to be learned was more along the lines of "never trust lies".

Sure, but in this case the lies ended up packaged as the official tourism statistics report from the government, and I'm pretty sure it was neither the first nor last time that happened.

>We can and should trust statistics. We should just never trust their relation to future behavior.

99% of people I've ever met believe statistics and forecasting are synonyms.

Mostly because it gets used that way in a political sense.