Coronavirus

Statistricks: how they lie to you with numbers (part 1)

If we’re going to fight back against the populists’ calculated assault on truth, we need to raise our numbers game

• Part 2: ‘We send the EU £350m a week’ (no, we don’t)
• Part 3: Why are all polling companies run by Tories?
• Part 4: ‘The UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7’ (no, it isn’t)

Maths is scary.

There are plenty of maths wizzes out there, of course, and most of us, when the necessity arises, can perform basic calculations. It’s just that these operations don’t come naturally to human beings. For most of our species’ history, there was little need for any more mental arithmetic than “one/two/many” and “our tribe small, their tribe big”.

If your brain isn’t adequately trained, maths requires serious mental effort, which most of us will go to any lengths to avoid. As a result, when confronted with a differential equation or trigonometry problem, we curl into a ball and whimper, “Oh, I’m rubbish with numbers!”

So when it comes to statistics, just as with molecular biology and nuclear physics and translating ancient Phoenician, we tend to leave things to the experts. The catch is, the main conduits of this knowledge from professors to public – the media – are as clueless about maths as we are.

As a veteran of journalism of 25 years, I can let you in on a scary secret: reporters – even reporters who are specifically charged with writing about business and science and trade – rarely have any sort of background in maths or economics. Most of those who aren’t media studies or journalism graduates studied humanities (English, modern languages, history, politics, law), and the same goes for the subeditors and desk editors whose job it is to check their work. In the average newspaper office, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who tell an x-axis from a y-axis, a percentage point from a percentage or a median from a mean. And TV interviewers, judging by their performance before and since Brexit, are no better.

Most of us aren’t too bad at figuring out when people are trying to mislead us with words or facts or pictures. But because we’re useless with numbers – and the gatekeepers are too – we’re much more susceptible to numerical shenanigans. Statistics can be massaged, manipulated, misrepresented and murdered as easily as words can. And it is this human weakness that the populists are counting on.

What I want to try to do in the next few posts is look at some of the more common examples of statistical chicanery that you will come across, in the hope that at least a few more people can start calling out the bastards who are trying to rip our society apart. (If I miss any obvious ones, please add your suggestions in the comments.)

(If you have no time to read on, I beg you to consider buying or borrowing a copy of Anthony Reuben’s Statistical: Ten Easy Ways To Avoid Being Misled By Numbers (Constable, 2019). It’s clear and concise and bang up to date, covering Brexit and Trump (but not coronavirus), and an easy read even for the fraidiest maths-phobe.)

The truth, the half-truth, and nothing like the truth

Sometimes, of course, as our present government demonstrates on a daily basis, populists are perfectly happy to forsake real numbers for entirely imaginary ones.

Think Owen Paterson’s assertion that only 5% of Northern Ireland’s trade is with Ireland, when the true figure is at least 30%; Jacob Rees-Mogg merrily retweeting the Sun’s innumerate bollocks about how much cheaper your shopping basket will be after Brexit; Dominic Raab overstating the cost of the CAP to British agriculture by a factor of 1,600%; Daniel Kawczynski’s ludicrous lemons claim; Matt Hancock counting pairs of gloves as two individual items of PPE; Matt Hancock including coronavirus tests on the same person and testing kits put in the post in the 100,000 total of tests carried out; Matt Hancock counting nurses who haven’t left towards the total of extra nurses employed; Boris Johnson, and thus, subsequently, the entire Conservative party, repeating until blue in the face that the Tories are building 40 new hospitals, when in fact they have committed to only six; Boris Johnson’s claim in January 2020 that the economy had grown by 73% under the present Tory government, when in fact the data covers the period back to 1990, which includes 13 years of Labour; Boris Johnson’s brazen and still unretracted claim that there are 400,000 fewer families in poverty since the Tories came to power, when in truth there are 600,000 more.

The chief drawback of straight-up untruths, of course, is that they’re easy to check and challenge. Most of the fictions above were exposed as such fairly quickly (though not before they’d burrowed their way into a few million poorly guarded minds). A far more effective way of misleading people is to present numerical information that is not incorrect, per se, but which tells only part of the story. To offer up, if you like, a fractional truth.

11/10 for presentation

If you’ve ever used a dating app, chances are you didn’t upload as your profile picture that zitty red-eye selfie you took in the Primark fitting room. You hunted through old snaps, maybe asked a camera-handy friend over for a mini-shoot, possibly even added a flattering filter, did a bit of Photoshopping, and judiciously cropped out the boyfriend. In short, you went to reasonable (or extreme) lengths to paint yourself in the best possible light.

This process – statisticians call it “cherry-picking”, but I prefer “Instagramming” – is the populists’ most common way of abusing numbers (it can also be applied in reverse, to show something in its worst possible light). If the absolute figure (say, 17.4 million) is the most impressive, use that. If the percentage best advances your case, use that (but if it’s, say, only 51.9%, poof! It’s gone). If neither of those works to your advantage, what about the trend?

Which brings us to our first example.

‘Trade with the EU is declining’

OMG! Trade with the EU is declining?! Tomorrow, our trade with them will be nothing! We must end all commerce with them now!

That’s clearly the reaction this claim was designed to elicit, and there were enough people lacking either the ability or the inclination to check it that it succeeded in its goal.

While it wasn’t one of the primary arguments advanced by the Leave campaign, it’s a drum that rightwing politicians, commentators and newspapers have been beating since day one. It was also one of the central planks of the “failing EU” narrative, which you still hear to this day.

Still, if the UK’s trade with the EU is shrinking, surely it’s a point worth making?

The first problem here is that the statement is not true. UK trade with the EU has grown steadily since we joined, as even House of Commons figures show:

(I couldn’t find an HoC graph covering the whole period, but the figures are all out there.)

Which shouldn’t come as a colossal surprise, as these are our closest neighbours, with whom we have enjoyed ever closer ties for almost 50 years. Of course trade with them is always going to grow.

So what is Thickinson wittering on about? It turns out what she meant is that the UK’s trade with the EU as a proportion of its overall trade has been decreasing (slowly) since 2000. Trade with the EU is still growing, but trade with other countries is growing faster.

(The trend was bucked in 2019, when the share rose to 46%, which is why they bit their tongues on this one for a while.)

So, not exactly a precipitous decline, but if trade with the EU as a proportion of overall trade is shrinking, shouldn’t we be a little worried?

Well, no, for two reasons.

First, trade outside the EU has increased precisely because of EU trade agreements with other countries and blocs, such as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Canada, Mercosur and South Korea. In other words, trade with the EU has (proportionally) fallen because of trade through the EU. (For the benefit of those who have been living under a rock for five years, the UK will cease to be a signatory to all those deals as well as its EU agreements from January 1 2021. Sure, we might renegotiate some after exit, but there’s no guarantee of that, and even if we succeed, they’ll almost certainly be on less favourable terms, as the UK now has a lot less negotiating clout than it did as part of a bloc of 510 million people.)

Second, the countries with which the UK’s trade is growing more quickly are on the whole much smaller; they are developing countries. Trade with developed nations, and with nations with which trade relations are already well established – such as those in the EU – is never going to grow particularly fast, because it’s all grown up already.

Let’s take, as a hypothetical example, the nation of Arsendia. If you were to tell me that trade with Arsendia had increased by 1,000% over the past year, while trade with the EU 27 had grown by only 0.2%, I’d think, “Whoa! Maybe Arsendia is the future!” But if I then discovered the somewhat relevant supplementary information that trade with Arsendia this year was worth £110, compared with £10 in 2018-19, while the value of trade with the EU stood at £668bn, I might come to a slightly different conclusion.

To take a real-world example often cited by Brexiters, over the last 20 years, trade with Commonwealth nations has increased by a factor of more than three.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the value of UK trade with EU countries has merely doubled.

But now look at the absolute figures. Exports to the EU in 2019 were worth £300bn (43% of the UK total), and imports from it £372bn (51%). Meanwhile, UK exports to all the Commonwealth nations combined in 2019 were worth £65.2bn, while imports from those countries had a total value of £64.5bn. That’s less than a fifth of the EU total.

Again, pretty much what you’d expect when countries tend to do most of their trade with their neighbours, and most Commonwealth countries are half the fucking world away.

Adversely comparing the rate of growth of trade with established trade partners with the rate of growth of trade with tiny, brand-new buddies is the equivalent of a father taking a tape measure to his 18-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, then saying, “Sorry, Kev, but Lisa’s grown three inches this year and you’ve barely sprouted at all, so I’m afraid she gets all the attention now.”

This is a common statistical misapprehension called the base rate fallacy, or ignoring the baseline. Expect it to make a reappearance, as it is one of the populists’ favourite subterfuges.

(The United States’ share of global GDP is declining for the exact same reason – less developed nations are eating up the pie because they have more scope to expand quickly – but you won’t find any of the Brexit zealots shouting about that.)

Let’s try to boil this down into something so simple that even the average Tory MP can understand it. Trade with the EU is growing. Trade with some other, much smaller countries is growing a little faster, because they have more capacity for growth, but that’s unlikely to continue for long. The EU, the UK’s closest neighbour, is, and will always remain, the UK’s most important trading partner.

A recurring theme of these posts is going to be: whenever you see pat statistical statements like Dickinson’s, by politician or commentator or journalist, they are not giving you the full picture. It’s not necessarily their fault – there isn’t enough space. But the space shortage gives them an excuse to Instagram the data; to present only the facets of the information that best supports their agenda.

For a full understanding of the situation, you need to a) read beyond the headline or tweet, and ideally trace the source of the data; b) do further research, or at least read some rebuttals; and if neither of those is possible, c) ask questions. In the particular case of “Trade with the EU is declining’”, the relevant questions would be: “What level is it declining from?”, “How fast?”, and “Is this trend likely to continue?”

As we’ll see time and again in the coming posts, without the proper context, numerical information is useless. However great the emotional impact on you, you must not draw any conclusions until you see the wider picture. If you can’t overcome your fear of numbers, you must at least stop meekly accepting them.

Next time: let’s fund the NHS instead!

Apples and oranges: how bad metaphors mess with your mind

The far right’s awful analogies helped swing Brexit – and now they may threaten your life

“Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician” – Winston Churchill

For too long, too many people have been listening to populists: know-nothing blatherskites offering simple solutions to complex problems. As a result, the UK has left the EU, nutsacking the economy and the opportunities of the young and triggering a massive rise in racial and class hatred; Jair Bolsonaro has laid waste to the Amazon rainforest; and Americans have elected an incompetent, incontinent, incoherent pussy-grabbing golf cheat as president.

How did the far right achieve this coup? With lies, mostly; but blatant lies most people can see through. Subtler tinkerings with the truth are far more effective.

In 1987, the French scholar Françoise Thom wrote an essay describing the Newspeak-style “wooden language” that the totalitarian regime of Soviet Russia used to fob off, confuse and pacify its citizens. (Orwell’s Newspeak was based on a similar idea of language as an instrument of control.) She identified four main characteristics:

use of abstract terms over concrete – attractive-sounding but empty slogans (think “Brexit means Brexit”, “Global Britain”, “Take back control”, “Get Brexit done”, “levelling up”), and vague terms like “sovereignty” and “democracy” and “freedom” that sound great but signifiy nothing;

Manichaeism – nuance-free, black and white thinking that paints everything as a battle between right and wrong, good and evil: “You’re either with us or against us”, “Enemies of the people”, “You lost, get over it”, “Get behind Brexit”;

tautology – repetition of the same idea: “20,000 police officers”, “40 hospitals”, most of the above catchphrases;

bad metaphors.

Since the first three are all pretty self-explanatory, it’s the last one I want to look at.

You may recall learning about similes and metaphors in English lessons. Quick refresher: a simile is a figure of speech that compares one object to another using the words “like” or “as”; a metaphor does the same thing, but by saying the two things are one and the same. So “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile, while “Love is a battlefield” is a metaphor.

(While, strictly speaking, similes, metaphors and analogies are different things, their difference is largely in form, not function, so I’ll be using the terms more or less interchangeably.)

But it turns out metaphors aren’t just for Robert Burns and Pat Benatar. They underpin the very way we think, and if misused, can actually change what we think. A bold claim, I know. Bear with me.

Why do we use metaphors? In 99.9% of cases, they’re an explanatory tool. Metaphors tend to describe something that is less familiar to the listener in terms of something that is more familiar. The unfamiliar quantity – what psychologist Julian Jaynes (pdf) called a metaphrand, but which is now usually referred to as the target – might be an abstract concept (say, love), a complicated or disputed thing (the EU), or a brand-new thing (like coronavirus). The familiar quantity – the metaphier, or source – will generally be something concrete, which we regularly encounter in everyday life: a rose, a football match, influenza. So in “Love is a battlefield”, “love” is the target, the unfamiliar thing, and “battlefield” is the source.

The point is, we can easily summon a mental picture of battlefields and roses and football matches, and most people have some experience of the flu. We have much more trouble visualising abstract, complex and new things, like love, the EU and coronavirus, so people naturally turn to analogies to demystify them. The catch is that some metaphors do not work as advertised.

Two things determine the quality of a metaphor: the accuracy of the comparison, and its richness – the number of ways in which the things resemble each other. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” is a good metaphor because there are parallels galore between the stage and everyday life (not that surprising when you consider the stage was created as a representation of the world). Bill explores some of them himself: men and women are like actors, playing roles rather than living out their desires; they enter life, and they leave it, just as actors enter and exit the stage; the various phases of life are a bit like the acts of a play.

If, on the other hand, you’d never heard of sulphuric acid, and I explain it to you by telling you it’s a bit like water, you’ll be justifiably mad at me after you drink it (and survive). Ditto if you encounter your first snake, and I say, “Don’t worry, it’s just a big worm.” Bad metaphors can bite.

If anything ever called for a judicious analogy, it was Brexit. Few people – myself included – understood the full detail of how the EU worked, what the benefits of membership were, what the trade-offs were between sovereignty and trade and geopolitical harmony, and how integrated the UK was in EU supply chains. The far right was quick to fill this gap; two of their metaphors have framed much of the Brexit debate.

1. Oppression/confinement/freedom

“EU dictatorship.” “EU shackles.” “Take back control!”

2. Sport/war

“You lost, get over it.” “You just want a replay until you get the result you want.”

Daniel Hannan quote-tweeting Gary Lineker: "If every football match were replayed until you got a result you liked, England would romp home"

These are superficially powerful lines, which conjure vivid images and cut straight to our sense of self. But as soon as you interrogate them in any detail, they fall apart.

In what respects does the EU resemble a dictatorship? Well … it does take some decisions on its members’ behalf; but it consults its members on those decisions. Members vote on all laws and can veto them. And oftentimes, those members ignore the decisions without sanction.

There are no votes in a dictatorship. They’re run by self-appointed tyrants who tend to reign for life, and they’re characterised by the use of force, propaganda, and an intolerance of opposition and independent media. Dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. And crucially, no one is free to leave a dictatorship.

None of these things apply to the EU, and yet the Brexit gibberlings would have you believe that Guy Verhofstadt is Hitler reincarnated. The propagandists tried to persuade us that the worm was a snake, and a lot of us swallowed it.

Now, in what respects did the EU referendum resemble a football match? A few simple follow-up questions – “What have you won? What have I lost that you haven’t lost too?” “What role did you play in this glorious victory?” “Where do the people who voted leave but have since change their minds fit in, and the handful of remainers who have swung the other way? Are they winners, or losers?” “If your team gets beaten by another one, do you suddenly give up on your team and start supporting the other side?” – expose this comparison as equally flimsy.

When remainers pointed out the possible pitfalls of Brexit, the populists pooped out yet another crap analogy. “Millennium bug!” they chirped. “People issued dire warnings about that, and nothing happened!” Yes, it’s true that then, as now, some people prophesied doom. But that’s literally the only parallel between the two situations. The actors were different, the conditions were different, the entire realm of knowledge was different, the problem was different, and the solutions were different. And crucially, in the case of Y2K, steps were taken to mitigate its effects, without which catastrophe might well have struck.

John Redwood blog comparing Brexit concerns to Millennium bug

(It’s not just the far right that is guilty of this; the populist, pro-Brexit far left also seems to have a predilection for teeth-grindingly terrible comparisons.)

Paul Embery: crap analogy about Labour and shopping

Rachel Swindon: terrible analogy about Corbyn and football

Remainers did hit back with some counter-metaphors – membership of the EU is more like belonging to a golf club, they said: if you stop paying your dues, you no longer get to play on the course or drink in the bar. But it was all too feeble, too late. The right’s shit metaphors had forced their way into enough people’s heads, put down roots, and become unassailable truths.

And as if that wasn’t enough for them, the populist demagogues and disinformants, emboldened by their Brexit “success”, continued to wheel out their cack-handed comparisons in response to the coronavirus.

Hodges tweet: if a mad passenger tried to take over a plane because he didn't trust the pilot, would you help?

Mail on Sunday dross geyser Dan Hodges can’t help himself; he genuinely seems to consider himself a maven of metaphor, the Svengali of simile.

Dan Hodges: coronavirus strategy = football strategy — Football comes up a lot, doesn’t it. Wonder why?

But in their perpetual, desperate quests for attention and relevance, Trump and Brexit party banshee Ann Widdecombe had to go one further.

Trump: coronavirus is no worse than flu (March 9th 2020)

Widdecombe: coronavirus will be like Aids - not as devastating as feared

Covid-19 and influenza are both contagious respiratory illnesses caused by a virus, but that’s as far as the similarities go. The symptoms are different, the infection rates are different, the morbidity rates are different, and the treatments are different. The viruses aren’t even part of the same family.

As for the Aids comparison, where to begin? Aids isn’t even a goddamn virus (it’s the final, often fatal stage of the illness caused by HIV).

Graphic comparing stats/characteristics of flu, Covid-19, Sars and Mers

Trump and Widdecombe’s offhand disinformation goes beyond simple irresponsibility and borders on criminal negligence. Hard though it is to credit, there are people out there who have faith in their wisdom, and they’re repaying their fans by putting their lives in grave danger. (The Express presumably figured this out eventually, or caved in after massive outcry, as it took the Widdecombe column down, which is why I could only screenshot the New European’s response.)

They’ve been at it in America for a while, of course. Anyone who has politely suggested to a gun nut that US gun laws might be a tad on the lax side will be familiar with this retort: “Well, cars kill people too, and no one talks about banning them!”

The problem with this analogy, once again, is that it is fucking shit. Cars are not expressly designed to kill people. Their primary purpose – conveying people and goods from place to place quickly and efficiently – is so damned useful that society has reluctantly decided tolerate the occasional accidental death. Besides, driving is subject to all sorts of rules and regulations. You can’t drive under a certain age, you can’t drive drunk, and you have to obey speed limits and the rules of the road.

“Hold your horses, Bodle – aren’t you getting your panties in a bunch over what are, at the end of the day, just words?” you cry, mixing three metaphors.

But as Hitler and Goebbels knew, as Orwell knew, as the Russian security services and Cambridge Analytica have long known and as others are finally slowly realising, words matter. In an ever more compartmentalised and specialised world, we’ve become unprecedentedly reliant on others for information. On matters we haven’t personally mastered, we have to trust someone. And terrifyingly, a large swath of the population has stopped trusting experts and instead turned to populists and their sloppy, misleading, and often downright dangerous metaphors.

Why am I so concerned about metaphors in particular? Because they’re sneaky. When you encounter a fresh metaphor, it brings you up short. “That’s odd,” thinks your brain. “Not seen that before,” and you take a closer look. If I say, “British shoppers in 2020 are locusts,” you’ll probably spend a couple of seconds weighing it up before deciding whether or not you agree.

If enough people agree with a metaphor, it might catch on, and pass into wider use. So when you read “The elephant in the room” (a metaphorical phrase that dates to the 1950s) or “Take a chill pill” (early 1980s), it’s familiar enough that it no longer has the same jarring effect – you don’t for a second imagine that anyone’s talking about a real pachyderm squatting in your lounge – but still novel enough that you are aware of its metaphorical origin. Now it has become a cliche; if it’s lucky, it might even get promoted to idiom. And when idioms stick around for long enough, a further stage of evolution occurs, and they become part of everyday speech.

The language of abstract relationships – marriages, friendships, etc – almost exclusively borrows the vocabulary of physical relationships. So we talk about the ties between people, breaking up with someone, being close to someone and growing apart. We talk about grasping an idea and beating an opponent and closing a deal. You’ve probably rarely, if ever, reflected on the metaphorical origins of these phrases when using them.

And if you talk about time in any meaningful sense, you will find yourself drawing on the lexicon of space. You simply can’t conceptualise it any other way. You go on a long trip. You were born in the 20^th century. You look back on your youth. Time passes by.

Julian Jaynes’s theory – and I’ve never seen a better one – is that humans have a “mental space” (not a literal one, obviously), a sort of internal theatre, where we visualise things in order to make sense of them, and that without this spatialisation, we can’t properly think about things at all.

Metaphors are not just for bards and bellettrists – they’re part of everyday speech and thought. A huge number of words we use, especially those for abstract concepts, started life as metaphors, but have become so widely used that they have developed meanings of their own. Our dictionaries now contain hundreds of thousands of definitions that have separate entries for the literal and figurative meanings of words.

In fact, if you look up the etymology of any abstract concept you can think of, the chances are, it originated from a word or words for tangible things or everyday actions. The word “understand”, for example, derives from under- (Old English “among”, “close to”) and standan (stand). “Comprehend”, meanwhile, comes from con- (with) and prehendere, to gain hold of: to take within. “Money” can trace its family tree to Latin moneta (“a place where coins are made; a mint”), while the verb “to be” ultimately comes from the Sanskrit bhu, meaning “grow”, while the parts “am” and “is” come from a separate verb meaning “breathe”.

Metaphors, it turns out, are fundamental to our conception of the world. They play a massive role in shaping the way we think.

Suddenly, the populist far right’s strategy comes into focus. By putting out misleading metaphors like “EU dictatorship” and repeating them until blue in the face, they’re trying to normalise them. To make people forget that they are in fact just opinions, and mould them into self-evident truths.

(It turns out that there is a crucial difference between metaphors on the one hand and similes and analogies on the other. Similes and analogies are upfront about their intentions – they explicitly admit that they are comparisons, subjective judgements, up for dispute. Metaphors, meanwhile, brook no dissent.)

Never trust an analogy from a populist. How can they explain things to you when they’re totally unversed in the subject-matter? How can Ann Widdecombe possibly know how similar coronavirus is to Aids when even she would admit she knows nothing about either? Only recognised experts know the target domain (in this case, epidemiology) well enough to judge what source makes a good or bad metaphor. Populists just pull things out of thin air that feel right, regardless of their accuracy or utility. This is why popular science books are written by scientists, not populists, why popular economics books are written by economists, not populists, and so on.

“Understanding a thing,” according to Jaynes, “is arriving at a familiarising metaphor for it.” So if people are pushing duff metaphors on us, we’re going to misunderstand things – and as we’re seeing with Brexit, Trump, and especially coronavirus, the consequences of that can be grave.

What can you do about it? Well, the next time someone wheels one of these similes or metaphors or analogies, don’t let it pass. Ask them directly: in what respects is the EU like a dictatorship? When they inevitably fail to answer, point out the differences. Extend the analogy until it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Even if you can’t get through to them, you might just help prevent someone else who happens to be following the exchange from falling into the same deadly trap.

To finish on a more positive note, here’s how metaphors should be done. Kudos to @ptp335: