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Close banner Close. Email address Sign up. Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing. VICE: The word "statistics" has a bad reputation.
They are often seen as the most boring part of a news story. Why should we care about them? Tim: Statistics are a very important way of understanding the world. There are sixty to sixty-five million people in the UK. There are seven billion people in the world.
You can't get a picture of what's happening purely by anecdote. You need to see what the numbers actually say—whether you're trying to understand the doctors strike, inequality, health stories, the financial crisis, environmental change, anything really. Statistics will tell you things you can't learn any other way. One of the things that we do on More or Less is to ask quite simple questions that other people could ask but don't.
OK, so when you see a news story with a lot of statistics in, what are the sort of things that might raise a red flag? I think there's a basic reality check you can do on most statistical claims. You can just ask: Does that sound reasonable?
For example, somebody was tweeting me saying, "Apparently we throw away millions of disposable coffee cups every day, can this be true?
Is it likely that ten percent of the population goes to Starbucks, buys a coffee, and then throws it away? Yeah, that sounds about right. When I replied, she said, "Well that's a shocking waste. A lot of things times sixty million are going to seem like big numbers. It's not that difficult. So are there certain big numbers, like the number of adults in the UK or the total UK public spending, that are worth keeping in our heads, so when we see stories that have big numbers in, we can provide some context?
The thing is, it's not very hard to check. A lot of this stuff you can find really quickly. If you've got Google, you can often find a proper fact-check of a claim that you doubt quite quickly from organizations that devote themselves to independent fact-checking, such as Full Fact.
Or Snopes , who look at urban myths, the sort of statistics you might see on Facebook. What does a statistical urban myth look like? Well, for example, with the EU referendum, there's one going around saying that the EU has a twenty-seven thousand word memo on the regulation of cabbages, as a way of showing that it's a big unnecessary bureaucracy.
And Snopes very simply lays it out and explains that story started in America in the s and has been doing the rounds ever since. It's never been true.
If all this information is widely available, why do you think we are still misled by statistics in news stories?
I think we instinctively reject the statistics that were made by people we perceive to be political opponents, and accept the ones that chime with our view of the world. I saw a graphic on Instagram, I think it was from the Washington Post , which should know better, and it was about support for some aspect of gay rights. I can't remember the details, but it was showing that support for gay marriage is increasing in the US. And for me, that's wonderful news, I'm very pro-gay rights, so I just retweeted that.
Then someone replied and said, "Have you seen the axis on that graph? Then the next dot was two years further on. It was just a very dodgy graph. I hadn't checked. Getting into the water after eating will have no more effect on your body than going for a walk.
In fact, the movement of your body in the water, particularly if you are just a little kid with floaties on, is more restricted than that of a typical walk. Granted, if you were to swim rigorously for exercise, you wouldn't want to jump in the pool and start swimming lines right after a big bowl of Chili unless your goal is to chum for some sharks with your mouth. This one actually comes from an old wives tale that slowly became popular over the years.
Supposedly, your stomach is using oxygen to digest food that your muscles need to swim. In actuality, the amount of oxygen your body needs to swim is more than satisfied, whether or not you've eaten recently. This cutesy little kids site is one of many offering swimming tips that still buys into the old "wait 30 minutes" rule. These lies aren't without their consequences. What happens when they find out the 30 minute statistic is false. Doesn't that suggest that the other stuff on the page must be false, too?
A horseplay revolution could arise, complete with much more serous acts of rebellions like kids diving in the shallow end, swimming during electrical storms and thinking they could stay under water longer by biting fart bubbles. Christmas: A season of joy and togetherness and shopping and joy and shopping.
It might be true that Christmas has become really commercialized as you might have heard from Charlie Brown once or twice , but people generally seem to enjoy it. Aside from the stress, and family you hate, the travel and the junk lying around the house, of course.
And the music. Actually, when we hear that suicide rates jump during the holidays, it's easy to believe it. Especially if you've ever spent a Christmas drunk and alone, tearing up as you sit in your apartment and watch your favorite Christmas movie from childhood Die Hard.
Actually, the suicide rate goes down significantly. While it's depressing as hell to be alone on Christmas, the truth is most of us aren't.
It's just hard to commit suicide when there's people around constantly trying to get you to wear ugly sweaters. Depressed or not, most people aren't big enough dicks to let the kiddies find them hanging over the Christmas tree with a note pinned to their chest. In this case, no one fooled us more than ourselves. It's what they call confirmation bias; we decide ahead of time that people should get depressed over the holidays, so when we hear somebody killed themselves on Christmas, we assume the holiday was the reason.
Never mind that far more people kill themselves on President's day, and most other lesser holidays. Never mind that there could have been a thousand other reasons to be depressed. The movie Gremlins , for one. A character quotes the suicide stat, which is one of several scientific inaccuracies we noticed in that film see swimming after eating.
But also, just about every newspaper in the country tends to climb on board. Studies indicate that newspapers actually emphasize suicides during the holidays over the rest of the year, again assuming a link between the suicide and the holiday when they didn't even know if the victim recognized that it was the holiday at all. In the general population, whether or not you believe this stat tends to depend on how much you hate Christmas see this typical response from a ray of sunshine talking about how it's "no wonder" suicide rates go up that time of year.
For some reason, when we're miserable we like to project it on other people, and assume they're all miserable too. And, if thinking that other people are suicidal makes you feel a little less suicidal yourself, then go for it.
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