The Number in the Headline
"Doubles your risk" can mean your danger went from one in a million to two — every word true, and almost nothing moved.
- EP-013
- Thursday · Draw
- The Ledger
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"Doubles your risk" can mean your danger went from one in a million to two — every word true, and almost nothing moved. This episode hands you a field kit of five questions that open any headline carrying a number: the denominator, the baseline, the graph's ruler, the correlation dressed as a verdict, and the winners' stories the losers never got to answer.
Drawn from: plain arithmetic worked and verified in the script (one-in-a-million doubled is two-in-a-million; a rise from 2% to 3% is honestly a "50% increase" and also one person in a hundred); the standard chart-reading caution about truncated axes; and the plain logical facts of correlation versus causation and survivorship — none of which any author owns. No in-copyright text used. Copyright-clean.
General education, not advice. Sources are named on screen and in the description; where a guideline body is named, its current guidance governs. The disclaimer.
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How to Lie with Statistics — Darrell Huff
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
drink deep
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