David Spiegelhalter at Aeon: “…Many criticised the Leave campaign for its claim that Britain sends the EU £350 million a week. When Boris Johnson repeated it in 2017 – by which time he was Foreign Secretary – the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the official statistical watchdog) rebuked him, noting it was a ‘clear misuse of official statistics’. A private criminal prosecution was even made against Johnson for ‘misconduct in a public office’, but it was halted by the High Court.
The message on the bus had a strong emotional resonance with millions of people, even though it was essentially misinformation. The episode demonstrates both the power and weakness of statistics: they can be used to amplify an entire worldview, and yet they often do not stand up to scrutiny. This is why statistical literacy is so important – in an age in which data plays an ever-more prominent role in society, the ability to spot ways in which numbers can be misused, and to be able to deconstruct claims based on statistics, should be a standard civic skill.
Statistics are not cold hard facts – as Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise (2012): ‘The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.’ Not only has someone used extensive judgment in choosing what to measure, how to define crucial ideas, and to analyse them, but the manner in which they are communicated can utterly change their emotional impact. Let’s assume that £350 million is the actual weekly contribution to the EU. I often ask audiences to suggest what they would put on the side of the bus if they were on the Remain side. A standard option for making an apparently big number look small is to consider it as a proportion of an even bigger number: for example, the UK’s GDP is currently around £2.3 trillion, and so this contribution would comprise less than 1 per cent of GDP, around six months’ typical growth. An alternative device is to break down expenditure into smaller, more easily grasped units: for example, as there are 66 million people in the UK, £350 million a week is equivalent to around 75p a day, less than $1, say about the cost of a small packet of crisps (potato chips). If the bus had said: We each send the EU the price of a packet of crisps each day, the campaign might not have been so successful.
Numbers are often used to persuade rather than inform, statistical literacy needs to be improved, and so surely we need more statistics courses in schools and universities? Well, yes, but this should not mean more of the same. After years of researching and teaching statistical methods, I am not alone in concluding that the way in which we teach statistics can be counterproductive, with an overemphasis on mathematical foundations through probability theory, long lists of tests and formulae to apply, and toy problems involving, say, calculating the standard deviation of the weights of cod. The American Statistical Association’s Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (2016) strongly recommended changing the pedagogy of statistics into one based on problemsolving, real-world examples, and with an emphasis on communication….(More)”.