Name: When can you trust statistics? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-06-17T18:45:09.000Z
Duration: 4 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

whether it's a striking graph going viral on social media,

a politician claiming that life has gotten 62% better

or just something everyday, like a piece of economic data,

Or joke that 98% of statistics are made up on the spot.

After all, nobody likes to be taken for a fool.

But we can't just reject all statistics equally.

Statistics can show us things about the world

Instead, we have to exert a bit of brain power

to figure out what is true and what is not.

That sounds hard, but perhaps it's not as hard as you might think.

Most statistics come packaged up with emotional baggage.

They're supposed to make us angry or joyful or afraid.

Staggering deficits, shocking rates of crime,

These emotions are why numbers go viral on social media,

There's nothing wrong with feeling emotions,

So before you share a claim that has you hot under the collar,

take a moment to notice your instinctive reaction -

Once you've noticed it, look at the statistic again.

For example, when the UK Health Secretary said in 2020

that the NHS would save £100 million over five years

if everyone who was overweight lost a few pounds.

What does he mean by overweight, for example?

And what evidence does he have to support this claim?

is simply to understand whether £100 million is a big number.

But there are 67 million people in the UK,

that if every overweight person lost some weight,

the NHS would save the equivalent of 30 pence per UK resident per year.

Statistics can be a very complex subject,

but you can get a long way with simple questions about context.

You don't need a lot of fancy maths, just a search engine,

the back of an envelope, and a curious mind.

Which brings me to the third important principle - be curious.

When we use a number as a weapon in an argument,

Of course we don't have time to do all this for every claim we see,

so a final habit is to ask yourself whether the source

of a statistical claim is respecting the three Cs.

A good journalist will help you be calm, will give you context,

A viral 'gotcha' circulating on Twitter or WhatsApp

We shouldn't just accept statistics unthinkingly,

but neither should we dismiss them without thinking either.

Three simple habits - be calm, get context, and be curious -

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When can you trust statistics? | BBC Ideas

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