The Power of Numbers to Deceive

Large numbers are impressive, so people often fail to put them into perspective. That’s why advertisers and advocates love to use them to get more sales or to garner support for a cause. Examples pop up daily, especially in this age of COVID-19.

 

Every day the local and national news media blast out the latest coronavirus totals. Millions of cases and over one quarter million deaths get our attention. In fact, relative to other causes they are very big numbers. It is a serious problem, but no one reminds us that 15 million is less than five percent of the population. Furthermore, I have never heard a news organization report on the number of people who have recovered. It’s sure to also be in the millions. It seems that people come out on two extremes: they either don’t take it seriously enough or they are unnecessarily terrified of catching it and dying. Perhaps if the news gave a more honest, measured account, more people would have an appropriately moderate reaction.

 

I found another example in a health report. “The Federal Trade Commission is sending 70,142 checks and PayPal payments totaling $3,864,824 to consumers nationwide who bought Quell, a wearable device that supposedly would treat chronic pain throughout the body when placed below the knee.” The company was fined almost $4 million for misrepresenting their product! Consumers who were gullible enough to buy the product will be reimbursed. That’s about $55.10 each for a device that is advertised on sale for $99 – not exactly a money-back guarantee – but the $4 million fine seems impressive.

 

Class action lawsuits are also typical. Chipotle, accused of falsely advertising its food as GMO-free, settled for $6.5 million. After the lawyers took 30%, that left their customers with a claim of $2 per meal with a cap of $30 per household, but it “could be less than this depending on how many claims are made.” Again a big number reduced to peanuts per person.

 

Similarly Johnson & Johnson, a favorite target for lawsuits, was ordered to Pay $6.3 million in the Infant’s Tylenol Settlement. That came out to $2.15 a bottle.

 

The number of home burglaries in 2018 was 685,766, about half of total burglaries (1,230,149), and about half of those happened when people didn’t lock their doors. But when buying a home security system you will hear, “A burglary happens once every 26 seconds.”

When big numbers are spread across many people, it doesn’t add up to very much.

 

In some cases, the news media implies big numbers just in their tone. A couple of years ago they wanted us to believe that school shootings were common, but what happened to school shooting news when the presidential campaigns got into full swing? The problem didn’t go away, but the news did. 

 

According to Education Week, twenty-five incidents occurred on school grounds or during school-sponsored events resulting in five student deaths, only one under the age of 14. Any such deaths are tragic, but that’s five out of 56.4 million students. Should anyone panic over such minuscule probability?

Headlines about these extremely rare events like shark attacks are easy to ignore, but when kids are involved, it’s different. Parents are terrified at the prospect of their child being abducted. Nosey neighbors report them for letting kids walk alone and authorities respond. An elementary school in South Carolina won’t let the kids whose mother wants them to walk home, leave school without an adult. “Today, only 10% of American kids walk to school, down from about 50% in 1969.” 

Reuters tries to assure parents: “Kidnapped children make headlines, but abduction is rare….On average, fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year since 2010.” Then Parents.com tells them, “Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child becomes missing or is abducted.” But they don't tell them that 0.1% are abducted by strangers, over 95% simply ran away and 99.8% are later found alive. 

 

It’s an endless battle against the media, politicians and charities selling products or ideas and raising  funds using big numbers. The best defense is perspective.

Flashback - Unbelievable Numbers?

[Almost a year ago I wrote about the statistics that politicians, pundits and experts spread without any support. They are repeated to the point where everyone accepts them as gospel, and no one bothers to check. It happens often. These are just a few that I highlighted at the time.]

Politicians and other entities trying to raise awareness to one or another kind of problem or injustice love to toss out surprising numbers to gain support for their cause. In many cases these are not real numbers. They could be based on data collected by the program itself with no effort to be unbiased, in fact, the more shocking the better. They may have been based on a single survey that made no effort to confirm results, and may directly conflict with the results of similar surveys. Like the unverified number of discarded plastic straws that was really based on a small survey for a grade-school project that led to such an uproar, the numbers are often repeated so many times by so many people that everyone assumes they are correct. 

With so many examples, how can we tell what to believe?

Everyone knows that ten thousand steps per day is the recommended amount to stay healthy and to boost longevity – or do they? This NPR piece tells us “the idea of walking at least 10,000 steps a day for health goes back decades to a marketing campaign launched in Japan to promote a pedometer” and is not some kind of magic number. In a recent study published in JAMA, older women who averaged 4,400 steps per day were better off than those taking only 2,700, with little or no benefit over about 7,500 steps. This finding was confirmed elsewhere.

The myth of 10,000 daily steps is akin to 8 glasses of water daily. There is no basis. Someone made it up. The best advice, to drink when you are thirsty, continues to be drowned out by the “hydration parrots” who swear by 64 ounces.

Other examples include the unacceptably high number of school shootings. The Campus Safety Magazine puts the number for 2018 at 82, “the highest there have ever been since 1970.” They mention that the second highest was 59 in 2006, so it can hardly be called a trend, perhaps more of a blip. They then state that the majority didn’t happen on school property – indicating a rather loose definition of school shooting. Compare that to the Wikipedia list of each occurrence by location with a total of only 36 for the same year.

A Time article calls into question the widely circulated number of one in five women in the US having been raped. They call that number misleading noting “the striking disparity between CDC figures and the Justice Department’s crime statistics based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (which includes crimes unreported to the police).” This article provides much detail and there is room for doubt (as I pointed out earlier), yet we continue to hear the same number.

Of course everyone also knows that crime and teen pregnancy are worse than ever – not so fast! “Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century.” Here is a link to that Pew survey from earlier this year showing several graphs on violent and property crimes all heading in the right direction, although you’d never know it from the news coverage. That explains why the public perception is the opposite. Likewise a site called the Seeker reports, “the fact is that teen pregnancy is low and has been dropping.”

Can the recent increase in tornados be attributed to Climate Change? This article from a Carbon Brief posting calls it highly uncertain – with references to the data. “What is clear is that there is no observable increase in the number of strong tornadoes in the US over the past few decades,” adding: “Any role for climate change in affecting the conditions for tornado formation is still very much an open question and the subject of ongoing research by the scientific community.”

Finally, are there more black men in prison in the US than in colleges and universities? It’s a handy throwaway line for a speech emphasizing victimhood, but I picked that one apart very nicely about 5 years ago.

We can’t rely on the orators, advocates, media and advertisers to get it right. Use critical thinking. Question everything.

Flashback - Terrifying Children

[This entry comes from not too long ago, August of this year, and was originally titled How to Shade the Truth. As I pointed out, shading the truth to attract viewers or make a political point is both common and cold-hearted.]

Here is a point of view I might want to push: Although there has not been a lot of news lately about school shootings, they are still a major problem. Parents and students alike should still worry about the safety of schools and demand something be done about gun violence.

If I am CNN, I run a headline on July 26, 2019 saying, “There have been 22 school shootings in the US so far this year.” Wow, that is almost one every 10 days!

They define a school shooting as one where someone was hurt or killed and that happened on school property. It includes incidents of accidental discharge and those where the weapon was a BB gun, because they are “potentially lethal.”

Seeing only the headline would cause many to assume that the shootings involved a K-12 student during regular school time. The examples in detail tell a different story.

They are listed in reverse chronological order. The first three happened in school parking lots or playgrounds during summer break. One of the people shot was 36 years old, riding his bike though a high school parking lot. 

The next two victims were a teen shot in the parking lot after a fight broke out, and a 25-year-old man playing basketball at a Chicago elementary school playground.

Four of the incidents happened at Universities, none of them inside buildings. Likewise, of the remaining thirteen incidents, only six actually happened inside a school. One involved a 16-year-old student “trying to buy marijuana from a 17-year-old student.”

The single incident of note was the well-publicized one death and eight injuries at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. “Two male students were charged with murder and attempted murder; one of them told police he sought to target classmates who had bullied him.”

Of course school shootings are bad: one is too many. But let’s be honest about it. There were not 22 since the beginning of the year as most people would understand them. A 46-year-old man shot multiple times by his neighbor in a high school parking lot “amid an ongoing argument over a parking spot” is not really a school shooting in any sense of the term. 

This is the kind of shading and spinning that the media often do to achieve the shock factor desired to retain readership and viewership. It pays to read the rest of the article; it pays to question headlines; it pays to use critical thinking. It especially pays when you know they have a hidden agenda or an incentive to get you all upset – which is always.

[These are not only common but cruel. The 22 in the headline became 6 inside a K-12 school during school hours and only one that fits a commonly held understanding of a school shooting. With over 100,000 public schools in the US, these incidents are exceedingly rare - an impression the news media tries to cover up. What are not rare are headlines like this one: “There are kids who simply are scared to go to school.” How is this practice not a form of child abuse?]

How To Shade the Truth

Here is the story I want to tell: Although there has not been a lot of news lately about school shooting, they are still a major problem. Parents and students alike should still worry about the safety of schools and demand something be done about gun violence.

If I am CNN, I run a headline on July 26, 2019 saying, “There have been 22 school shootings in the US so far this year.” Wow, that is almost one every 10 days!

They define a school shooting as one where someone was hurt or killed and that happened on school property. It includes incidents of accidental discharge and those where the weapon was a BB gun, because they are “potentially lethal.”

Seeing a headline like that many would assume that the shootings involved a K-12 student during regular school time. Looking at the examples in detail tells a slightly different story.

They are listed in reverse chronological order. The first three happened in school parking lots or playgrounds during summer break. One of the people shot was 36 years old, riding his bike though a high school parking lot. 

The next two victims were a teen shot in the parking lot after a fight broke out and a 25-year-old man playing basketball at a Chicago elementary school playground.

Four of the incidents happened at Universities, none of them inside buildings. Likewise, of the remaining thirteen incidents, only six actually happened inside a school. One involved a 16-year-old student “trying to buy marijuana from a 17-year-old student.”

The single incident of note was the well-publicized one death and eight injuries at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. “Two male students were charged with murder and attempted murder; one of them told police he sought to target classmates who had bullied him.”

Of course school shootings are bad: one is too many. But let’s be honest about it. There were not 22 since the beginning of the year as most people would understand them. A 46-year-old man shot multiple times by his neighbor in a high school parking lot “amid an ongoing argument over a parking spot” is not really a school shooting in any sense of the term. 

This is the kind of shading and spinning that the media often do to achieve the kind of shock factor desired to retain readership and viewership. It pays to read the rest of the article; it pays to question headlines; it pays to use critical thinking. It especially pays when you know they have a hidden agenda or an incentive to get you all upset – which is always.

Child Abuse Awareness

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. One objective is to raise awareness of child abuse issues. Certainly this includes instilling fear in children to promote one’s ego or enforce one’s authority. But doesn’t instilling fear in a child to promote one’s political agenda have the same detrimental effect?

Take for example the incident a few weeks ago when a number of young children were driven to Dianne Feinstein office to persuade her to vote in favor of the Green New Deal. Most of the media attention was on the Senator trying to dodge the questions with little notice to the state of the children. They were afraid and panicky – and they didn’t get that way on their own. It likely came from parents more concerned about the environment than children’s immediate mental health and wellbeing.

One young girl says, “We have come to a point where our earth is dying!” Isn’t planting an idea like that in a child’s mind and encouraging it to grow also a form of abuse?

 A similar situation arises from pictures of polar bears. The Weather Channel headline reads: “Heartbreaking Photos Show Stranded Polar Bears Floating on Ice.” A quote from an Italian photographer (not a scientist) follows: “I believe the survival of this species on high arctic islands is strictly related to sea ice," although he “actually found more bears than he expected.”

The fact is that polar bears are at home in and around water. “Polar bears are pretty strong swimmers – probably the strongest of all the land-based predators. They will spend much of their time in swimming and thus they are sometimes referred to as marine mammals.” Most such pictures show them on one of many ice floes looking stranded, but they are able to swim 60 to 70 miles in open water. “The longest distance covered by any polar bear in swimming is about 427 miles…. She swam for up to 9 days continuously through the Beaufort Sea...” Stranded, indeed!

Another source questions the fuss about them being endangered when the “polar bear populations have been increasing overall since the 1970s.” The fuss, of course, is that polar bears are an example of charismatic macro-fauna. They look sweet and cuddly (from a distance) and, like orphan children in those charity solicitations, easily tug at our hearts, encouraging us to turn off our critical thinking. This effect is strong on children who can put pressure on their parents to support various causes. Isn’t such manipulation also abuse?

Finally, school shootings are a terrible blight on the country, but does that justify the number of children who are scared to go to school? The LA Times refers to the “prevalence of school shootings,” as schools lock doors, arm teachers, conduct drills and come up with all kinds of countermeasures to what is really a fairly rare event – despite anxious news coverage. Meanwhile politicians play on the fear to renew calls for additional gun restrictions.

There are over 132,000 schools in the US with about 55 million students.

The average number of school shootings per year since 2000 (including last year, a statistical anomaly) has been 36.6 resulting in about 20.2 deaths per year (not all students) according to the CDC. They add that among youth aged 5-18, “between 1% and 2% of [homicide] deaths happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school.”

The full CDC report (Table 6: Number of deaths from selected causes, by age: United States, 2016) gives more information. The age breaks in the table are different, stopping at 14 rather than 18, but it allows for a reasonable estimate of deaths from other causes to compare to the 20.2 shown above: Flu, 356; Motor Vehicle Accidents, 1455; Accidental discharge of firearms, 74; Accidental drowning and submersion, 708.

The chance of a child being killed in any other situation is 50 to 100 times greater than by a firearm in school, at a school activity or traveling to or from school. Many other threats are also greater. Yet this is what we scare our kids about. Maybe it’s time to start ignoring the theatrics of the news media and teach our children to exercise some critical thinking and perspective.

Maybe also it’s time to extend the definition of child abuse to include terrifying children, intentionally or unintentionally, with unreasonable fear in order to push political agendas.

Gun Violence

Let’s take a rational, critical thinking-based look at gun violence.  Interest groups and the news media avoid this by taking opinion polls and starting on-line petitions in the heat of the moment, when we are filled with wonder, outrage and grief.  This is clearly not the time to be making long-term policy decisions, but it’s a pattern nonetheless – a truck crashes on the beltway and new safety regulations arise; trains collide and requirements for expensive electronic monitors are passed.  Shootings spark new gun laws.  Within 100 days of the Benghazi attack, a Congressional Mandate calls for 1,000 additional marines for embassy security.  Sensational coverage of exceptional events drives knee-jerk reactions ahead of well-thought-out answers.

With the recent string of shootings in a Colorado theater, the Milwaukee Sikh temple, a Baltimore high school, and a NJ grocery store, along with the murder-suicide by an NFL player and the recent terrible tragedy in Connecticut, there is a new cry for legal solutions.  Some say that we need fewer guns in society; others argue for more.  Some endorse school patrols and/or secured and bulletproof doors and windows.  Others emphasize the mental-health aspect of the problem.  There is a cost to each of these proposals, but when even one life can be saved, no one talks about the cost or possible unanticipated consequences.

These shootings were the irrational acts of five people – 5 out of 300 million.  Is it possible to keep guns out of the hands of such people, any more than to keep explosives out of the hands of terrorists, drugs out of the hands of addicts, drunk drivers off the road or alcohol away from minors?  Would forcing them to stop and reload buy enough time for authorities (or others) to react?

An interesting slant on the issue came several months ago from “public health experts” who suggest we treat gun violence as a social disease, following the model used to reduce highway deaths.  Over many years the number of traffic deaths has decreased even as the number of vehicles on the road has increased thanks to better road design, safer guardrails, mandatory automobile safety equipment.  When you can’t count on correct behavior, set up conditions that minimize the risk.  Beyond promoting defensive driving, avoiding distractions and not driving under the influence, they also “engineered in” safety by modifying streets and requiring vehicles to have seatbelts, front airbags, side-impact airbags, and mandatory safety seats for children.  (Notice the progression, and more technology is proposed.)  Gone are the days of riding in the open bed of a pickup truck.  Parents would be charged with neglect.

Applying this concept to gun violence, how do you engineer in safety?  The article lists some ideas:  stricter requirements for firearms purchases (including private sales), better oversight of design flaws, smart guns that allow only the owner to fire them.  Still, these suggestions deal primarily with the guns and not the environment or people whose lives are at risk.  Similar to drivers licensing, gun ownership might require both a written and range test with periodic retests.  Similar to seatbelts and safety seat laws, they might require children to wear protective vests at school.  (The sale of bulletproof backpacks is already on the rise.)   Could parents someday be charged for sending their child to school without one?  Do we need the equivalent of air marshals randomly patrolling schools, malls, theaters and convenience stores?  Some states now require all-night convenience stores to have two people working or a bulletproof enclosure or a security guard or to conduct business by a pass-through trough.  

These possibilities may seem farfetched, but wouldn’t mandatory seatbelts and airbags have seemed strange to Henry Ford’s contemporaries?  Didn't the government surveillance in Orwell's 1984 or the wall-sized televisions screens in Fahrenheit 451 sound like pure science fiction only 50 years ago?  Today security cameras and huge, flat HDTVs are commonplace.  We tolerate screening at airports that would have been shouted down as an unnecessary delay and invasion only 15 years ago.   When the government and advocacy groups get going, we must be alert to their tendency to get carried away.  Just recently, for example, a group proposed mandatory double-trigger spray bottles for household cleaners because adults can't be trusted to move spray nozzles to the "off" position, and children might be hurt.

With every restriction we can think of, accidents still happen.  Consider the case of the woman who accidentally shot her husband instead of the skunk she was aiming at.  She used her own gun, which was legally registered.  He was sitting inside his house; so even under the craziest scenario may not have been wearing his bulletproof vest.

When motivated by good intentions in the face of extraordinary circumstances, the tendency to jump to regulatory solutions trumps calm consideration.  Remember, those responsible for recent tragedies were not concerned with laws.  In their irrational state, they could have done substantial damage with any weapon.  Success in regulating out of existence all aberrant behavior in any subject is highly unlikely.

In an economy so fragile (we are told) that raising taxes to the level of 12 years ago while cutting spending could spark another recession, we must consider the cost.  There are nearly 100,000 public schools in the US.  Pay and benefits for a couple of security guards at each could easily run $15 billion or more per year.  How many theaters and convenience stores (and places of worship) are there?  Who pays for all the bulletproof glass and other safeguards?  You know in the end we do.  And the argument that it’s worth it to save just one life is flawed.  (See Value of a Human Life.)

Advice to parents dealing with their children following the massacre in Newtown could apply to everyone:  Limit exposure to the news – the highly emotional, graphic and repetitive presentations in pursuit of ratings drives out perspective; Be honest in describing the situation; Emphasize that this was a rare event and that the world is still basically a safe place.  It’s time to calm down, step back, take a deep breath and start thinking about this critically.  There are good ideas floating around but some poor ones as well.  Regulators take their cue from the public.  We must get over our grief and start thinking clearly before endorsing proposals. 

Important questions to ask ourselves as we watch the regulatory train leave the station:  How effective will any change be in deterring these irrational characters?  What response, if any, makes sense in reaction to truly uncommon events?  What will be the overall cost in dollars and loss of freedom to the rest of us – could every trip outside the house eventually become the equivalent of boarding an airplane?  Are we ultimately trying to do the impossible, to "idiot-proof" the whole world through laws and restrictions so that no one ever gets hurt?  Have we reached a point where this is acceptable or even makes sense?