Author David Levitin A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World
by Daniel Levitin (Viking. £12.99 / €17)
Exposure to misinformation is part of the human condition. Some – Levitin calls them ‘lying weasels’ – will bend the truth in order to persuade us to buy something or believe in something; others simply don’t check their facts but don’t intentionally mislead.
In the age of the internet and social media we are exposed to more information – and therefore misinformation – than ever before. At the same time we are increasingly ‘time-poor’, too busy to question what we see, hear and read. Levitin urges us to find the time, to identify the source of a claim, to question its veracity.
Attention
He devotes much attention to graphs, handy means of representing year-on-year trends such as sales figures, the crime rate, deaths on the roads, but also easily manipulated: by fiddling around with the x or y axis, or both, you can make a trend seem more or less pronounced than it really is.
A graph tracking the unemployment figures in the US would indicate that the current rate of unemployment is low, tickling 5%. But some, Trump supporters in particular, would argue that the graph is inaccurate as it does not measure the numbers who have simply given up looking for work.
We visit a fictitious company that manufactures products called ‘frabezoids’, at a difficult time, with quarterly sales down by 12%. But all is not lost. The company devises a clever way of dressing up these poor figures, by presenting them in ‘a cumulative sales graph’.
This simply registers raw sales, but does not compare one quarter with another. The curve starts when frabezoids first went on the market and just goes on upward. It would rise even if the company only sold one unit a year.
Reliable technique
This is a reliable technique for burying bad news, one to which Apple has resorted when sales of the iPhone dipped.
Not everyone who misinforms us is a ‘lying weasel’. Respected organisations such as cancer charities also make claims that we can usefully question. When they tell us that doctors are gradually getting on top of cancer they are giving us accurate information; but when they tell us that more and more of us will develop cancer in our lifetimes they are saying something that is also accurate, but a little misleading, for some forms of cancer are much less dangerous than others.
Melanomas, for example, are easily treated, while pancreatic cancer is difficult to diagnose, and almost always fatal. Cancer largely being a disease of the old, its increasing incidence proves that we are living longer lives, something which in turn reflects medical progress.
We are swimming in a sea of misinformation. But technology has made it easy for us to access the information that allows us to refute spurious claims. An online archive can quickly help us establish whether something is true or false. In times past the same task might have required hours in a library.
We may be swimming in a sea of misinformation, but we don’t have to drown in it.