Transcripts

Joel Best:
Every day the newspaper, the radio, and the television give us statistics and a lot of those numbers aren't very good.

Joel Best, author of the book Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data, says a statistic you'll find in many sources is…

Every year, one billion birds die flying into windows. It turns out when you look at this that there's really not much evidence for it at all - it's just a kind of guess. Yet you find that number in very reputable sources.

In fact a lot of the time the statistics that people site as facts are simply guesses.

One of the numbers that I find very interesting are estimates for lost productivity where you'll read that some disease, Spam, March Madness, whatever costs "x" billion dollars a year in lost productivity. Those are little more than guesses.

When statistics show that a problem is growing, it is often because the definition of the problem has changed - for example the increase in the number of cases of autism.

Most experts who've looked at this believe that the reason autism is increasing is we've expanded the boundaries. So that more symptoms are considered to be evidence of autism therefore people who would not have been labeled with autism in previous years are now labeled as autistic.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.