The Numbers Game

September 22, 2008
Americans are assaulted by numbers, whether it's the latest political poll or most recent clinical study on caffeine. But what do these numbers really mean and are they communicating a categorical truth? Blastland and Dilnot, from the BBC radio show More or Less
, embark on a monumental task of interpreting numerical data and showing how its misinterpretation often leads to misinformation. “It is one thing to measure,” they write, “quite another to wrench the numbers to a false conclusion.” The authors take a close look at statistics that are accepted at face value—many stemming from scientific or medical discoveries. They examine everything from the link between alcohol and breast cancer risk to baseball batting averages to fascinating assessments of the manipulation of data by politicians when they talk taxes or the cautionary tale of a U.K. educational measurement program designed much like No Child Left Behind. Blastland and Dilnot apply their famously cheeky approach to the analysis of how people are duped, frightened or falsely encouraged by data.