Mike Carruthers:
Have you ever heard the statistic
that a hundred and fifty people a year are killed by falling coconuts?
It’s a number often given to put other problems into perspective,
you know - "that may be a big problem, but more people are
killed every year by falling coconuts." Joel
Best:
The problem that’s pretty obvious
is nobody counts how many people die by falling coconuts. It’s
a number that was made up and it circulated widely.
Joel Best, author
of the book, More
Damned Lies and Statistics, says we tend to accept statistics
as fact far too easily.
Statistics
are produced by people. Every number has been generated by somebody
who counted something. And you need to ask, who counted it,
why did they count it, what did they count, and so on.
There’s
a statistic that you’ve probably heard that a hundred thousand
people each year die from medical errors in hospitals.
That
is not an accurate count. That isn’t something where people
sat down and added up deaths that were marked due to medical
errors in hospitals. It’s sort of an estimate. In fact, when
people have tried to replicate that number they come up with
much lower figures.
But
that statistic is still used and believed by many to be fact.
Once
a number’s in circulation there’s not much you can do about
it. With the Internet and so on bad numbers live on forever.
They’re harder to kill than vampires.
For
transcripts and our free online newsletter, visit our website
somethingyoushouldknow.net. I’m Mike Carruthers, and
that’s Something You Should Know. |
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