What matters about numbers in the news
From Felix Salmon at Reuters
Let’s say that you saw various news reports about an event, and that different words were used to describe the weather: some said it was “cold”, others “brisk”, others “frosty”, others “wintry”, and so on. You wouldn’t raise an eyebrow: you’d see that they were all describing the same thing, in slightly different language, and you wouldn’t demand an explanation for the “discrepancy”. Well, numbers in news articles behave like words: they’re trying to describe the state of the world. That’s why the NYT has banned the use of “record” or “largest” unless inflation is taken into account. What matters is not the mathematical relationship between abstract numbers, but rather the state of the world that is being described.
Go and read the whole thing.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »