Communicating Numbers

Earlier this week I read this masterful blogpost on Andrew Gelman’s blog (though the post itself is not written by Andrew Gelman – it’s written by Phil Price) about communicating numbers.

Basically the way you communicate a number can give a lot more information “between the lines”. Take the example at the top of the article:

“At the New York Marathon, three of the five fastest runners were wearing our shoes.” I’m sure I’m not the first or last person to have realized that there’s more information there than it seems at first. For one thing, you can be sure that one of those three runners finished fifth: otherwise the ad would have said “three of the four fastest.” Also, it seems almost certain that the two fastest runners were not wearing the shoes, and indeed it probably wasn’t 1-3 or 2-3 either: “The two fastest” and “two of the three fastest” both seem better than “three of the top five.” The principle here is that if you’re trying to make the result sound as impressive as possible, an unintended consequence is that you’re revealing the upper limit.

Incredible. So 3 in 5 means one of them is likely to be 5th. And likely one is fourth as well. Similarly, if you see a company that calls itself a “Fortune 500 company”, it is likely closer to 500 than to 100.

The other, slightly unrelated, example quoted in the article is about Covid-19 spread in outdoor conditions. There is another article that says that “less than 10% of covid-19 transmission that happens indoors”. This is misleading because if you say “less than 10%”, people will assume it’s 9%! The number, apparently, is closer to 0.1%.

There are many more such examples that we encounter in real life. If you write on LinkedIn that you went to a “top 10 ranked B-school”, it means you DID NOT go to a “top 5 ranked B-school”.

Loosely related to this, I’ve got a bit irritated over the last year and a bit in terms of imprecise numerical reporting by the media (related to covid-19). I won’t provide links or quotes here, since what I can remember are mostly by one person and I don’t want to implicate her here (and it’s a systemic problem, not unique to her).

You see reports saying “20000 new cases in Karnataka. A majority of them are from Bangalore”. I’ve seen this kind of a report even when 90% of the cases have been from Bangalore, and that is misleading – when you say “majority”, you instinctively think of “50% + 1”. Another report said “as many as 10000 cases”. Now, the “as many as” phrasing makes it sound like a very large number, but put in context, this 10000 wasn’t really very high.

Communication of numbers is an art that is not very well spread. Nowadays we see lots of courses on “telling stories with data”, “data visualisation”, graphics, etc. but none in terms of communication of sheer numbers itself.

Maybe I should record an episode about this in my forthcoming podcast. If you know who might be a good guest for it, AND can make an introduction, let me know.

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