How Not to Fall for Bad Statistics – with Jennifer Rogers
Living is a risky business. If you believe the headlines, bacon is as deadly as smoking and fizzy drinks make children violent, but is that true? Subscribe for …
I scrolled through the comments a bit and maybe I missed something at the end. Didn't you say you would explain the hand shaking from the beginning at the end? I'm from Texas so forgive me if I missed it.
Having 1 extra person out of 400 dying of pancreatic cancer just because they chose to eat bacon doesn't seem like much, but if you consider the EU population of 500 million citizens, it means losing an extra 1.25 million people a year because of poor dietary choices. Again, it is easy to manipulate numbers if you don't look at the big picture. Please eat more fruits and vegetables, nuts and pulses, for your own sake.
8:15 did they really worked with people who eat bacon every day? Actually, how do you measure that? Say you have subjects who eat bacon every day, do they follow up with their lives until their deaths and count how many people developed cancer? Obviously not. Whatever the methodology in the research is, is it fair to interpret the results as prof Rogers did? I don't know, I would just really like to see it addressed more closely.
52% of 52 people = 27.04. How on earth can you have 0.04 of a person? Also 74% of 54 men = 39.96 men. Why are you not even questioning the very basis of these numbers?
I saw someone use a list of dog bite fatalities in the US. The problem was that they did not show the proportion of dog ownership by species – so it may have turned out that the 'most dangerous dogs' were simply the most popular dogs. I also think that getting that second dice roll because the first one did not match your hypothesis is well dodgy and you really should have been prepared for this and have had an explanation ready.
When she touched on W.H.O. data, she was standing at the edge of an abyss of bad statistics and selective data use. She could have run the rest of the talk just digging into what's wrong with it. Like counting the bacon, but not the bread it's sandwiched between.
MCAS is what happened in 2018 with the Boeing 737 MAX (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), and has to do directly with the in flight trim system and was a software glitch that sadly cost hundreds of human lives but was traceable to human error, but I digress.
One of my undergrad degrees was in Psychology, which, as 0% of people expect, was about 50% statistics. We learned all about the infinitesimal number of ways stats can be influenced and presented poorly to unfairly favour an outcome, and I also thoroughly learned how HARD stats is. Super super respect to the people who actually do this stuff full time and enjoy the brain-melting theoretical math behind it! You're doing incredibly noble work to fight misinformation too
excellent delivery . impressive ad lib when probability/dice experiment temporarily stalled. 1: junk publications publish junk . 2: mobile sleepers should avoid using loose sheets. 3: don't let Wall St take over safety critical businesses, such as airlines (Boeing. 2 crashes, 346 deaths in 2018).
36:25 To be precise, whether the null hypothesis is within the confidence interval is a different thing than whether the outcome is statistically significant.
I had just finished eating cheese right before she started the "spurious statistics". I was brushing my teeth during that segment and now I'm going to bed. Wish me me luck!!!!!!!
One of my favorite recent abuses of stats is "in the USA, the average Attorney makes the same money as the average Doctor" This conveys nothing about the relative incomes of the two groups. Most Doctors make within a narrow range of each other, near the average Doctors salary. Attorney's salaries widely vary from almost penniless to multimillions per year. More useful perhaps would be the median income and the standard deviation.
I took statistics for psychology in college instead of calculus and I will NEVER regret that decision. We went OUT into the world and took surveys, armed with a hypothesis and a clipboard. We could ask any question(s) we wanted. I asked: would you be willing to participate in a study? THAT was the study. If they said yes, I said thank you, carry on. If they said no (or ignored me) I said thank you for your input. EVERY response was a statistically relevant entry. This one question WAS the study. If someone stopped and asked to hear what the questions were, I told them. I wanted to see how many people would be willing to participate in a study. (Some were disappointed I didn't want to know more about their opinions) My hypothesis of 70% NO was verified with over 1500 queried, with about 1000 negative responses, 80% responded visually (shaking the head) or verbally, saying NO. The other 20% were comprised of people changing their path to avoid us, making a face at us, or using profanity towards us. I think those responses could be loosely interpreted as a NO. Disregarding the 3% of people who swear at people they like as a sign of friendship. My statistics professor told me IF you want to lie, use statistics, but if you want to prove something, use statistics. Also: Who is paying for this study? Who benefits from a certain result?
Bad statistics purveyed to the public much more often relate to improperly conducted statistical surveys rather than improper correlations drawn from survey results. In the social sciences and in the political sphere, improper statistical inferences typically are drawn if an insufficient sample of the target population is surveyed or if there is not a randomly drawn survey sample of the target population.
Time for cliché paraphrased quotations. Lies, damned lies, statistics. One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic. Lake Wobegon, where every child is above average.
Magnificent talk. I hope people will immunise themselves against bad statistics with education. Bad stats are only effective so long as people can't correctly interpret them.
Statistics isnt math unless a pile of shit becomes a banana split when you put some whip cream on top. You cant put some fancy looking math to a personal opinion (what defines a statistic? Whatever the statistician says it is. See: fiat currency) and call it science. Statistics is philosophy.
Crocodile vs Hippo.. how likely though are you to be injured by one when you come across one? I mean.. if you live in Florida, you may meet an alligator but probably never a hippo. Most of those alligators will just do their "I'm a tree trunk" thing. How many hippos, should you encounter one, would go after you? (Hint: they are notoriously territorial..) I knew someone who worked at a safari park and he mentioned he'd rather be in with the big cats than with the giraffes… You are not defining what you mean by "dangerous". "Which animal is more likely to eat you?" Not a giraffe, and definitely not in Northern Norway.. a gator in the Glades might though.. Hippos are aggressive animals that are easily be provoked. I won't likely ever come across a wild one though.. Definitions of "dangerous"?
Doh… Obviously there are far more Crocodiles, in far more parts of the world, as compared to the natural habitat of the Hippo and cheerleaders, of the teenage female variety, are notoriously prone to injury…
As for the car, surely it is not the driver who is at so much risk as those who are injured by them? (Passengers, pedestrians, cyclists etc…) Anyway, I'm pretty sure that a significant number of the injuries that cyclist's suffer are inflicted by inconsiderate and incompetent drivers…
It is really nice to have finally arrived at point in British societal history, where an academic hasn't felt the need to abandon their regional accent. Another great RI lecture, made by another talented mind.
I did "statistics" as part of a Psychology degree, and HATED it, because it was self evidently just a Garbage Recycling station. It was self evident to me, like so much was, back in my youth, because I was almost always the smartest person in the room(at least that is how I remember it), and it took me ages to realise I had to get out of rooms full of dumbfeks. When I got into rooms with actual smart people, I realised I had a lot to learn.
"Googling" for information tangential to "BBC" does not correlate to statistical enlightenment.
I scrolled through the comments a bit and maybe I missed something at the end. Didn't you say you would explain the hand shaking from the beginning at the end? I'm from Texas so forgive me if I missed it.
Excellent stuff.
If we could get 50% of people doing this 75% of the time, Daily Mail circulation figures would plummet.
52% of 52 people agreed to the twice daily thing!
Having 1 extra person out of 400 dying of pancreatic cancer just because they chose to eat bacon doesn't seem like much, but if you consider the EU population of 500 million citizens, it means losing an extra 1.25 million people a year because of poor dietary choices. Again, it is easy to manipulate numbers if you don't look at the big picture. Please eat more fruits and vegetables, nuts and pulses, for your own sake.
I'm sorry…….. but I can't stand her voice… she reminds me of my teenager classmates back in school.
Cycling versus driving – define “danger”. Of injury? Of death? Of injury or death to others?
Uh .., she made a huge stat error in the bacon part. I stopped watching.
im gonna recommend this to the stats unit i tutor
8:15 did they really worked with people who eat bacon every day? Actually, how do you measure that? Say you have subjects who eat bacon every day, do they follow up with their lives until their deaths and count how many people developed cancer? Obviously not. Whatever the methodology in the research is, is it fair to interpret the results as prof Rogers did? I don't know, I would just really like to see it addressed more closely.
Great content, great presenter!
52% of 52 people = 27.04.
How on earth can you have 0.04 of a person?
Also 74% of 54 men = 39.96 men.
Why are you not even questioning the very basis of these numbers?
I saw someone use a list of dog bite fatalities in the US.
The problem was that they did not show the proportion of dog ownership by species – so it may have turned out that the 'most dangerous dogs' were simply the most popular dogs.
I also think that getting that second dice roll because the first one did not match your hypothesis is well dodgy and you really should have been prepared for this and have had an explanation ready.
Another factor is the number of surveys thrown away – if I throw away every survey that doesn't fit my message the stats aren't valid.
When she touched on W.H.O. data, she was standing at the edge of an abyss of bad statistics and selective data use. She could have run the rest of the talk just digging into what's wrong with it. Like counting the bacon, but not the bread it's sandwiched between.
MCAS is what happened in 2018 with the Boeing 737 MAX (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), and has to do directly with the in flight trim system and was a software glitch that sadly cost hundreds of human lives but was traceable to human error, but I digress.
Also got to say this is to date my favorite Royal Institute video she did an awesome job and communicated something very important and relevant
Am I really going to be the first person to say that 87.9% of Statistics are made up on the spot?😎
Statistically 78,3% of people will believe anything if you add statistics to it
One of my undergrad degrees was in Psychology, which, as 0% of people expect, was about 50% statistics. We learned all about the infinitesimal number of ways stats can be influenced and presented poorly to unfairly favour an outcome, and I also thoroughly learned how HARD stats is. Super super respect to the people who actually do this stuff full time and enjoy the brain-melting theoretical math behind it! You're doing incredibly noble work to fight misinformation too
Channels with videos interrupted by adverts have fewer views. Correlation = causation!
Oh sweetheart, your voice is like nails on a chalkboard.
excellent delivery . impressive ad lib when probability/dice experiment temporarily stalled. 1: junk publications publish junk . 2: mobile sleepers should avoid using loose sheets. 3: don't let Wall St take over safety critical businesses, such as airlines (Boeing. 2 crashes, 346 deaths in 2018).
Stats is written to favour the client
36:25 To be precise, whether the null hypothesis is within the confidence interval is a different thing than whether the outcome is statistically significant.
I had just finished eating cheese right before she started the "spurious statistics". I was brushing my teeth during that segment and now I'm going to bed. Wish me me luck!!!!!!!
My take away from this is … Ben & Jerry need to make bacon flavored ice cream !
Airlines assign seats by computer to load balance and optimize lift and fuel economy.
Just to be pedantic, you spelt disagree wrong in the presentation.
I ride a motorcycle every day, work with chemicals for a living, and skydive for fun. Your statistics can suck it. 🙂
advertisers are selling a dream, illusion is King and your deflationary
fake news vs. faked news
One of my favorite recent abuses of stats is "in the USA, the average Attorney makes the same money as the average Doctor" This conveys nothing about the relative incomes of the two groups. Most Doctors make within a narrow range of each other, near the average Doctors salary. Attorney's salaries widely vary from almost penniless to multimillions per year. More useful perhaps would be the median income and the standard deviation.
I took statistics for psychology in college instead of calculus and I will NEVER regret that decision. We went OUT into the world and took surveys, armed with a hypothesis and a clipboard. We could ask any question(s) we wanted. I asked: would you be willing to participate in a study? THAT was the study. If they said yes, I said thank you, carry on. If they said no (or ignored me) I said thank you for your input. EVERY response was a statistically relevant entry. This one question WAS the study. If someone stopped and asked to hear what the questions were, I told them. I wanted to see how many people would be willing to participate in a study. (Some were disappointed I didn't want to know more about their opinions) My hypothesis of 70% NO was verified with over 1500 queried, with about 1000 negative responses, 80% responded visually (shaking the head) or verbally, saying NO. The other 20% were comprised of people changing their path to avoid us, making a face at us, or using profanity towards us. I think those responses could be loosely interpreted as a NO. Disregarding the 3% of people who swear at people they like as a sign of friendship. My statistics professor told me IF you want to lie, use statistics, but if you want to prove something, use statistics. Also: Who is paying for this study? Who benefits from a certain result?
Bad statistics purveyed to the public much more often relate to improperly conducted statistical surveys rather than improper correlations drawn from survey results. In the social sciences and in the political sphere, improper statistical inferences typically are drawn if an insufficient sample of the target population is surveyed or if there is not a randomly drawn survey sample of the target population.
Crocoldiles are world wide. hippos are african
Time for cliché paraphrased quotations.
Lies, damned lies, statistics.
One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.
Lake Wobegon, where every child is above average.
Magnificent talk. I hope people will immunise themselves against bad statistics with education. Bad stats are only effective so long as people can't correctly interpret them.
The only way to improve on a year with zero airline deaths would be if airline travel brought dead people back to life.
Statistics isnt math unless a pile of shit becomes a banana split when you put some whip cream on top. You cant put some fancy looking math to a personal opinion (what defines a statistic? Whatever the statistician says it is. See: fiat currency) and call it science. Statistics is philosophy.
Only two minutes in:
Are there more crocodiles than hippos in the world?
Also:
Nobody ever claimed saltwater crocodiles are Africas most dangerous animal.
So this was a trick question, unless the data only is about areas where there are both hippos and crocodiles.
Crocodile vs Hippo.. how likely though are you to be injured by one when you come across one? I mean.. if you live in Florida, you may meet an alligator but probably never a hippo. Most of those alligators will just do their "I'm a tree trunk" thing. How many hippos, should you encounter one, would go after you? (Hint: they are notoriously territorial..)
I knew someone who worked at a safari park and he mentioned he'd rather be in with the big cats than with the giraffes…
You are not defining what you mean by "dangerous".
"Which animal is more likely to eat you?" Not a giraffe, and definitely not in Northern Norway.. a gator in the Glades might though.. Hippos are aggressive animals that are easily be provoked. I won't likely ever come across a wild one though..
Definitions of "dangerous"?
Eat bacon, but never eat cheese before you go to bed 😄❤️
Doh… Obviously there are far more Crocodiles, in far more parts of the world, as compared to the natural habitat of the Hippo and cheerleaders, of the teenage female variety, are notoriously prone to injury…
As for the car, surely it is not the driver who is at so much risk as those who are injured by them? (Passengers, pedestrians, cyclists etc…) Anyway, I'm pretty sure that a significant number of the injuries that cyclist's suffer are inflicted by inconsiderate and incompetent drivers…
It is really nice to have finally arrived at point in British societal history, where an academic hasn't felt the need to abandon their regional accent. Another great RI lecture, made by another talented mind.
It's a bit of a misleading example. Cycling is more dangerous than driving a car MAINLY BECAUSE of car drivers ;-)))
Absolutely fantastic
I did "statistics" as part of a Psychology degree, and HATED it, because it was self evidently just a Garbage Recycling station. It was self evident to me, like so much was, back in my youth, because I was almost always the smartest person in the room(at least that is how I remember it), and it took me ages to realise I had to get out of rooms full of dumbfeks. When I got into rooms with actual smart people, I realised I had a lot to learn.
I'm not from the U.K. so I'm just curious: can someone tell me what part of the country her accent is from?