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March 25th, 2024 (Permalink)
Who's Counting?
The first question to ask about any statistic is: Who counted it? That is, who is responsible for the statistic; who produced it? Statistics do not grow on trees. To produce a statistic, things must be counted, and people can miscount. So, any statistic is only as trustworthy as those who produced it.
The answer to this first question should prompt some follow-up questions: Were those who counted in a position to do so accurately? Did they have any conflicts of interest that would undermine their objectivity? What does their history show about their trustworthiness? Have they been sloppy or otherwise inaccurate in the past? Have they been caught lying or exaggerating? If those counting were in no position to do so accurately, objectively, or are simply untrustworthy, there's no reason to trust the count.
Case in point: No doubt people are dying in Gaza as a result of Israel's invasion, but how many? A current statistic is 32,3331, a number precise down to the ones place, which makes it appear to be an exact count rather than an estimate2.
The answer to the first question of who produced this statistic is: the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM). The GHM is the official health agency of Gaza and, since Gaza itself is controlled by Hamas, the GHM is also controlled by Hamas3. Hamas is a terrorist group that targets civilians, kills unarmed people of all ages4, takes hostages, and rapes5 and tortures its victims, including fellow Gazans6. In addition, Hamas members do not wear uniforms, hide among the civilian population of Gaza, use hospitals and schools as shelters, then exploit the inevitable civilian casualties that result for propaganda7. If Hamas is willing to use civilian deaths as propaganda, why should it not be willing to exaggerate the death toll in Gaza for the same reason?
Hamas has a strong motivation to exaggerate the death toll, and it's impossible to believe that it has any moral compunctions against doing so. Those defending the statistics put out by the GHM argue that past numbers have been in line with those gathered by the United Nations and other independent agencies8. However, we don't have to go back to earlier wars to question the GHM's death toll statistics. Remember the alleged Israeli airstrike on the al-Ahli hospital? It was GHM that almost immediately claimed that 500 people were killed in the explosion, though it later revised its statistic down a little. We later learned that almost everything about the initial reports of the explosion were wrong9: it was caused by an errant Palestinian rocket rather than an Israeli airstrike, and the rocket did not hit the hospital but exploded in a nearby parking lot10. Was the death toll also wrong?
Here's what a Human Rights Watch report on the incident had to say about that death toll:
The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that 471 people were killed and 342 injured. Human Rights Watch was unable to corroborate the count, which is significantly higher than other estimates, displays an unusually high killed-to-injured ratio, and appears out of proportion with the damage visible on site.11
The "killed-to-injured ratio"―also referred to as the "wounded-to-killed ratio"―refers to the fact that the number of those wounded in war usually outnumbers the dead. This is common sense, but it's also borne out by history, as one historian writes: "the typical ratio of those wounded to those killed in conflict has historically hovered around the 3:1 mark.12" Due to advances in modern medicine, the ratio has tended to increase in recent decades as more casualties are able to survive their injuries. In contrast, the dead outnumber the injured in the statistics provided by the GHM.
The second question to ask about any statistic is: How was it counted? In the case of the hospital incident, the 500 number was released by the GHM only about an hour after the explosion. It seems unlikely that an actual count could have been done so quickly, so this was probably an estimate as is also suggested by the roundness of the number. However, the later downward revision of the number to 471 could have been the result of an actual count.
In contrast, independent agencies estimated between one and three hundred killed13. These, of course, are only estimates since such agencies don't have the access needed to do an actual count. In the absence of a reliable count of deaths, the best that we can do is rely on estimates from reliable sources.
There are other reasons to doubt the death toll put out by the GHM14, but the above considerations are enough to treat it with skepticism. Given that we cannot trust the GHM, what can we do? We'll probably have to wait until the war is over for anything approaching an objective count of the casualties. We'll also have to wait until Hamas has been removed from power to find out how much control it exercised over the statistics coming out of the GHM, and how much the death toll was inflated. In the meantime, all that we can do is guesstimate the death toll based on what we know; let's do so by estimating a maximum and a minimum.
First, the maximum: the GHM's statistics are not completely useless because we have every reason to believe that they're inflated. So, we can take the GHM's current statistic of around 32K as a maximum.
The minimum is only a little more difficult: Israel itself claims to have killed 12K members of Hamas15, so clearly the order of magnitude (OOM) will be at least tens of thousands. Therefore, both the minimum and the maximum OOM is tens-of-thousands, so that we can claim with some confidence that the death toll in Gaza is in the low tens-of-thousands, but that's about as precise as we can reasonably be.
Notes:
- "Health Ministry In Hamas-run Gaza Says War Death Toll At 32,333", Agence France-Presse, 3/25/2024. The Gaza Health Ministry's own website appears to be inaccessible, presumably due to the war.
- One thing to be wary of in such statistics is over-precision: due to wartime conditions, there's no way that such a number can be completely precise even if it is a count and not an estimate. What is its range of measurement error? We're not told, which is a reason to be skeptical. See: Overprecision, 8/27/2022.
- Isabel DeBre, "What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll?", PBS News Hour, 11/7/2023.
- "14 kids under 10, 25 people over 80: Up-to-date breakdown of Oct 7 victims we know about", The Times of Israel, 12/4/2023.
- Farnaz Fassihi & Isabel Kershner, "U.N. Team Finds Grounds to Support Reports of Sexual Violence in Hamas Attack", The New York Times, 3/5/2024.
- "‘Strangling Necks’: Abduction, Torture and Summary Killings of Palestinians by Hamas Forces During the 2014 Gaza/Israel Conflict", Amnesty International, 5/25/2015.
- Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, "The Origin of Hamas's Human Shields Strategy in Gaza | Opinion", Newsweek, 2/27/2024.
- For instance: Jessie Yeung, Duarte Mendonca, Abeer Salman & Eyad Kourdi, "UNICEF defends accuracy of Gaza death toll as horror unfolds in ravaged enclave", CNN, 11/9/2023.
- Yascha Mounk, "How the Media Got the Hospital Explosion Wrong", The Atlantic, 10/23/2023.
- John Leicester, "French intelligence points to Palestinian rocket, not Israeli airstrike, for Gaza hospital blast", AP, 10/20/2023.
- "Gaza: Findings on October 17 al-Ahli Hospital Explosion", Human Rights Watch, 11/26/2023.
- Tanisha M. Fazal, "Nonfatal Casualties and the Changing Costs of War", International Security, 11/2014.
- Jeremy Herb, "Between 100 and 300 believed killed in Gaza hospital blast, according to preliminary US intelligence assessment", CNN, 10/19/2023.
- For instance, see: Abraham Wyner, "How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers", Tablet Magazine, 3/6/2024.
- Emanuel Fabian, "IDF says 12,000 Hamas fighters killed in Gaza war, double the terror group’s claim", The Times of Israel, 2/20/2024.
March 18th, 2024 (Permalink)
How to Lie with Headlines
Some recent headlines:
Trump suggests "it's going to be a bloodbath" if he loses the election1
Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he isn’t reelected2
Trump says there will be a 'bloodbath' if he loses the election3
This is just a selection; virtually all of the usual suspects in the establishment news media followed suit. Given the similarity of these headlines, it's tempting to think that a memo went out to these different news outlets and they all just followed directions. However, I think that temptation should be resisted; instead, I expect that this is the result of group think and herd behavior: some bellwether of the flock was the first to put out such a headline, and the others quickly followed without bothering to ask where they were going.
Some of the above reports provide enough context to debunk their own headlines. For example, beneath the CNN headline, we read:
Former President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that if he were to lose the 2024 election, “it's going to be a bloodbath for the country." The remark came as Trump promised a "100% tariff" on cars made outside the US. “We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected," Trump said in Vandalia, Ohio. "Now, if I don't get elected…it's going to be a bloodbath for the country."4
Here's what Trump said in context:
If you look at the United Auto Workers what they've done to their people is horrible. They want to do this all-electric nonsense where the cars don't go far, they cost too much, and they're all made in China, and the head of the United Auto Workers never probably shook hands with a Republican before. … China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico, and they think that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border. Let me tell you something to China: … those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to not hire Americans and you're going to sell the cars to us now, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those guys. Now if I don't get elected it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole―that's going to be the least of it―it's going to be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it, but they're not going to sell those cars.5
Trump is difficult to understand because he tends to talk in one long, rambling, run-on sentence, frequently interrupting himself in the middle of a thought to go off on some digression, sometimes returning to finish the thought and sometimes not. So, there's often some excuse for reporters misunderstanding what he says, but little excuse in this case. In context, it's clear that the "bloodbath" he was talking about was to the automobile industry in the United States, and not some kind of civil war or rioting. Out of context, in the headlines, the false impression is created that Trump is predicting, or perhaps threatening, political violence if he loses.
Some of the news outlets quoted above have now edited their headlines to make them less misleading; for instance, the ABC News headline shown above, which is a screenshot of the original, now reads:
Trump, addressing auto industry, says there will be 'bloodbath' if he loses election6
This is better, but it still doesn't make it clear that the "bloodbath" would be to the industry, rather than that he was just "addressing" the industry when he said it.
Many people read only the headlines, and even those of us who make an effort to follow the news often do not read beyond the headlines. In fact, I usually read just the headlines, perusing the underlying articles only if the headline piques my interest. The headline-only reader will be misled into thinking that Trump was threatening a bloodbath if he's not re-elected. When I first saw these headlines, I thought instead that he was probably warning that his followers would be angry enough to riot if he were to lose again. I had to actually read one of the articles to find out that he was talking about a "bloodbath" to the automotive industry. So, even in the case when the article itself includes enough context to show that the headline is misleading, the headline will still mislead many readers.
The headlines from establishment news sources now resemble those of the old tabloid newspapers, which were notorious for promising more than the story delivered.
Notes:
- Kit Maher & Alayna Treene, "Trump suggests 'it's going to be a bloodbath' if he loses the election", CNN, 3/16/2024.
- "Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he isn’t reelected", Today, 3/17/2024.
- Emma Barnett & Jillian Frankel, "Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election", NBC News, 3/16/2024.
- Ellipsis in the original; paragraphing suppressed.
- "Donald Trump talks about Bernie Moreno, his presidential campaign WCPO 9in Ohio", WCPO 9, 3/16/2024.
- Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Libby Cathey & Fritz Farrow, "Trump, addressing auto industry, says there will be 'bloodbath' if he loses election", ABC News, 3/17/2024.
Recommended Reading: Leo Benedictus, "The media must stop using misleading headlines", Full Fact, 5/28/2021
March 13th, 2024 (Permalink)
Seeing is Disbelieving
- I pay as little attention as possible to the British royal family, but I am interested in fake photography, which leads to the following entry. Kate, the Princess of Wales, has had some recent health problems, including abdominal surgery, and has been out of the public eye since last Christmas. In an apparent attempt to reduce the spread of rumors about her state of health, a photograph that appears to show her with her children was released. Subsequently, the photo was retracted by the Associated Press (AP)1, Reuters2, and even the official UK news agency PA3. Finally, the princess herself issued a public apology for supposedly personally "editing" the photo4.
What exactly was wrong with the photo? I'm not an expert on Photoshop―in fact, I've never used it―so I'll simply point you to some expert discussions in the notes5. However, while the photo can certainly pass the sort of casual glance that most people are likely to give it, even the untrained eye can see some odd things on closer examination. To me, the most glaring fault is at the top of the daughter's skirt on the side closest to her mother, where it appears that a part of the skirt was copied and pasted. Also, as pointed out by the AP and others, the daughter's left sleeve is misaligned with her hand, suggesting that the position of her arm may have been moved―see the detail of the photograph, above; you can see the full photo in any of the sources listed in the notes, below.
The family has so far refused to release the original, unedited photograph, thus contributing to suspicions about why it was retouched. In the absence of a full explanation, all we're left with is speculation as to how and why the photo was manipulated. For what little it's worth, my own speculation is that Kate's face and hands were added from one or more different photos, presumably older ones. If so, I hope it was done out of vanity and not from some more sinister motive.
Perhaps the most worrisome aspect of this affair is that the experts insist that the work done on the photo was amateurish, which is why some of the changes are so glaring. This suggests that a more professional job might have passed scrutiny. In the near future, it may be impossible to tell a professionally faked photo from a "real" one; in fact, the distinction between fake and real photography may be disappearing.
- Update: Late last year, I described how the sports website Deadspin smeared a boy as a racist by means of a misleading photograph6. Deadspin has now been sold and its entire staff laid off7. How much the sudden sale had to do with the controversy is unclear, but the boy's family filed a lawsuit just last month8. I'm no more a lawyer than I am a photography expert, but the parents seem to have a strong case against Deadspin for libel9.
Notes:
- Brian Melley, "Why the AP retracted the first official photo of the Princess of Wales since her abdominal surgery", AP, 3/11/2024
- "News agencies withdraw photo of UK's Princess of Wales", Reuters, 3/11/2024
- "Kate apologises for ‘confusion’ after digitally editing family photo", PA, 3/12/2024
- Bill Chappell & Fatima Al-Kassab, "What to know about the 'confusion' over Kate Middleton's edited family photo", NPR, 3/11/2024
- See:
- Alex Abad-Santos, "Kate Middleton’s edited Mother’s Day photo, explained by an expert", Vox, 3/12/2024. The most thorough analysis of the photo. If you only have time to read one article, read this one.
- Sydney Lake & Irina Ivanova, "Kate Middleton’s Photoshopped family photo and the glaring errors that led to kill notices: ‘Think of it as a Cat. 5 cyclone’", Fortune, 3/11/2024.
- Reece Rogers, "The Kate Middleton Photo’s Most Glaring Photoshop Mistakes", Wired, 3/12/2024.
- How to Lie with Photographs, 12/9/2023
- Liam Reilly, "Deadspin’s entire staff has been laid off after the sports site was sold to a startup", CNN, 3/11/2024
- Ahjané Forbes, "Family sues Deadspin after blackface accusation at Kansas City Chiefs game", USA Today, 2/8/2024
- See: Jonathan Turley, "Deadspin Defamation: Parents of Holden Armenta Move Toward Libel Action Over Black Face Allegation", 12/6/2023
March 3rd, 2024 (Permalink)
What Red Said
Three people nicknamed Goldilocks, Brownie, and Red were at the hair salon. Each had hair of a different color: one was a blonde, one a brunette, and one a redhead, but not in that order.
One of the three said: "I just noticed that none of us have natural hair color that matches our nicknames. Isn't that odd?"
Another replied: "That's true, but the really odd thing is that all of us are getting our hair dyed a color that doesn't match our natural hair color or our nicknames."
Red added: "Well, I'm not dying my hair brown."
Assuming that what each of the three said is true, what is the natural hair color of each and the color after the hair is dyed?
Since no nickname matches the person's natural hair color, there are only two possible color distributions:
Goldilocks | Brownie | Red | |
---|---|---|---|
1. | red | blond | brown |
2. | brown | red | blond |
Goldilocks | Brownie | Red | |
---|---|---|---|
Natural: | red | blond | brown |
Dyed: | brown | red | blond |
Explanation: Since Red was not getting his hair dyed brown, and he couldn't get it dyed red―since that would match his nickname―he must be getting it dyed blond. So, his original color must be brown. Because blond is taken, Brownie must be getting her hair dyed red and her original color must be blond. Finally, Goldilocks must be getting her hair dyed brown, and is a natural redhead. How they got those nicknames is a puzzle that must remain unsolved.
March 1st, 2024 (Permalink)
Heterodoxy Vs. Heresy & the Dog Ate My Data
- Adam Rubenstein, "I Was a Heretic at The New York Times", The Atlantic, 2/26/2024
James Bennet, the [New York] Times’ editorial-page editor, and James Dao, the op-ed editor, were committed to publishing heterodox views. … The Times had hired me to provide research for columnists and to solicit and edit newsy, against-the-grain op-eds. I brushed off my discomfort about the office politics and focused on work. Our mandate was to present readers with “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion,” as the Times’ founder, Adolph Ochs, put it in 1896. This meant publishing arguments that would challenge readers’ assumptions, and perspectives that they may not otherwise encounter in their daily news diet. …
Ochs was not, of course, calling for publishing just any opinion. An op-ed had to be smart and written in good faith, and not used to settle scores, derive personal benefit, or engineer some desired outcome. It had to be authentic. In other words, our goal was supposed to be journalistic, rather than activist. This, I learned in my two years at the Times, was not a goal that everyone shared.
Being a conservative—or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. …[T]ake the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly “unsubstantiated,” as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,” a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work.
There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist. But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with the liberal line. It was also clear that right-of-center submissions were treated differently. They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups. Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication. After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department.
I have omitted all of the author's account of editing the controversial opinion piece by Senator Cotton, together with the repercussions of its publishing, because it is long and needs to be read as a whole.
If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.
- Oliver Wiseman & Vinay Prasad, "We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys", The Free Press, 2/22/2024
A top cancer surgeon at Columbia University is under scrutiny after one of his research papers was retracted for containing suspect data. Twenty-six other studies by Dr. Sam S. Yoon, who conducted his research at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, have been flagged as suspicious by a British scientific sleuth called Sholto David. David raised the alarm after spotting the same images across different articles that described wholly different experiments. He has also found duplications and manipulated data in papers published by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that have since been retracted.
… In search of reassurance, I called up an expert: oncologist, [University of California, San Francisco] UCSF professor, the author of more than 500 academic papers, …Vinay Prasad. Here’s an edited version of our conversation. …
Vinay, how worried should we be about the problem of fraud in cancer research?
Extremely worried. There’s something very unique about all these papers that allows people to find the fraud, and that is they report the raw data, in the form of images. Most papers, though, do not contain images. The data is all hidden. The researchers only provide a summary of the data. You have to worry how much fraud you’d find if everybody provided all the raw data. I suspect you’d find a gargantuan amount of fraud. This is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Most laymen like me assume all the data is transparent in medical research. You’re telling me that’s not how it works?
Scientific papers are like someone’s dating profile on an app. They’re picking what pictures to show you and what stories to tell you. You don’t get to see the whole library of photos on their phone. Researchers are only presenting a sliver of what they’ve actually done. And just like a dating app on your phone, everything is inaccurate.
That’s shocking, Vinay. What can we do about it?
These concerns have been brewing for a while and they are reaching a tipping point. The fact that … there’s been all this image manipulation shows that the most venerable institutions are no safeguard against malfeasance. What punishment have any of these researchers actually faced? … All of the authors of these disputed papers have, to my knowledge, faced no sanction. Their paper gets withdrawn, but they still get promoted. There’s no punishment. A few years ago, there was a proposal by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors arguing that every paper published in the top journals should make the raw data available. That proposal was shot down because people were worried about their careers, and that other researchers would take their data and use it to make breakthroughs before them. Sharing is the solution. You should have to make all the data available whenever you publish medical research.
Not just medical research.
We start this month with another lengthy article* on the politically-motivated collapse of journalism at The New York Times.
* See: Illiberal Journalism & Tea with Terrorists, 1/1/2024
Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in these articles, but I think they're worth reading as a whole. In abridging them, I have sometimes changed the paragraphing and rearranged the order of the excerpts in order to emphasize points.
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February 17th, 2024 (Permalink)
200B or not 200B?
Earlier this month, The Irish Sun published an article on plastic water bottles which included the following claim in its headline:
Adults will drink from 200 billion single use plastic water bottles in a lifetime1
The first sentence of the article beneath the headline makes the same claim with a slightly different wording: "Adults will get through more than 200 billion single use plastic water bottles in a lifetime…." That sounds like a lot! Sadly, the remainder of the article says nothing further about this claim, instead making various other claims about plastic particles in the water and their possible health and environmental effects. This entry will address only the headline claim2.
There is one possible source of confusion in the headline that needs to be cleared up before we continue, namely, what is a billion3? A "billion" in British English used to mean a million million, whereas it is a thousand million in American English. So, in old sources one would need to ascertain whether the British or the American "billion" was meant. The article itself does not explain its usage, but the American "billion" is now standard, so I'll assume that "200 billion" means "200 thousand million", or 200,000,000,000. Again, that looks like a lot, but 200 of the old-fashioned British billions would be a thousand times more!
The headline claim is a good candidate for a credibility check4: Is it plausible that an adult uses 200 billion plastic bottles in a lifetime? How would you go about checking it for credibility? Try doing it yourself, then click on "Credibility Check", below, to see what I came up with.
Try dividing and conquering; if you don't know how to do so or need a refresher, see: Divide & Conquer, 2/4/2022.
The headline appears to say that an adult uses 200 billion plastic water bottles over the course of a lifetime; that's: 200,000,000,000 bottles. One way to check this claim is to divide and conquer. I don't have a good sense of how many plastic bottles I will use over my life, though the claim sounds incredible to me. However, I have a better sense of how many I use in a day, so let's divide 200 billion by the number of days in an average lifespan.
How long do people live on average? This depends on where you live and other factors, but the current average American lifespan is around eighty years, so let's go with that. How many days are there in such a lifespan? We simply multiply eighty by the number of days in a year, which gives us 29,200. So, if you're an American, you can expect to live close to 30,000 days―that seems alarmingly few!
Now, to see how many plastic bottles we supposedly use in a day, we simply divide 200 billion by 30 thousand, to get about 6.7 million bottles a day! Obviously, this is absurd.
If you have a good number sense, you may have realized that the headline claim was absurd even without doing a credibility check, but the check is still useful. As I mentioned, nothing in the article itself explains where the claim came from or what was supposed to justify it. However, a similar article was published the same day with the headline:
Over 200 billion single-use plastic water bottles are bought nationwide in a lifetime5
Apparently it's not an individual adult buying those 200B plastic bottles, but an entire nation. Which nation, though? This article is from a newspaper based in the United Kingdom (UK), so presumably the nation in question is the UK. The article itself is otherwise similar to The Sun's, and both would appear to be based on a press release put out by Ocean Bottle, a company that is promoting its reusable water bottles6. In effect, both articles are ads for the company's bottles.
While this headline makes more sense than the first, what does it mean to say that 200B bottles are bought "in a lifetime" when we're not talking about an individual person? Except metaphorically, nations do not have "lifetimes", and the UK is still "alive" and we've no idea how much longer it may "live", so how could we know how many bottles will be bought in its "lifetime"?
Yet another newspaper article sheds enough additional light on this mystery that we may be able to solve it; here's its headline:
Average adult will buy almost 4,000 single-use plastic water bottles in their lifetime7
In comparison to the previous headlines, this is a plausible claim, amounting to fifty bottles a year over the course of an eighty-year lifetime, so about one bottle a week. However, beneath the headline, the article reads: "This amounts to over 200 billion plastic water bottles bought nationwide…". So, this is where the 200B bottles claim comes from, but there is still some mystery as to how we get from the headline of 4K bottles in an average adult's life to 200B for the entire UK. Is it 200B over a span of eighty years? If so, then it's only two-and-a-half billion a year, which doesn't sound so bad, but perhaps that's just in contrast to 200B: it's "only" 2.5B.
Here's a possible solution to the mystery: If we assume that those eighteen and over are adults, then about three-quarters of the population are adults8. The population of the UK is approximately 68 million9, so 3/4ths is 51M. 51M times 4K is just a bit over 200B, so this may be the source of the headline number. If so, 200B is an estimate of how many plastic bottles will be used by the current population of adults in the UK over a period of eighty years.
What a strange statistic! Why was this bizarre statistical claim created? The obvious reason, and the only one that I can think of, is to inflate the number in order to get an extremely large one for the headlines. The 200B statistic seems to have originated with Ocean Bottle, and the tabloid newspapers of the UK simply repeated it, apparently without even understanding it.
Notes:
- Dan Coles, "Plastic Bits: Adults will drink from 200 billion single use plastic water bottles in a lifetime–even though it’s bad for their health", The Irish Sun, 2/5/2024.
- I am skeptical of many of the claims made in the body of the article, and perhaps will address one or more of them in a future entry.
- "Billion", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 2/16/2024.
- For advice on how to check credibility, see the following series:
- Compare & Contrast, 1/7/2022
- Divide & Conquer, 2/4/2022
- Ratios, Rates & Percentages, 3/27/2022
- Ballpark Estimation, 4/21/2022
- Martin Winter, "Over 200 billion single-use plastic water bottles are bought nationwide in a lifetime", Express, 2/5/2024.
- I haven't been able to find an actual press release, but the articles are so similar that it seems likely they were based on the same source. The following webpage contains many of the claims from the newspaper articles, including the 200B bottles claim: "Break Up with Bottled Water", Ocean Bottle, accessed: 2/17/2024.
- Martin Winter, "Average adult will buy almost 4,000 single-use plastic water bottles in their lifetime", Mirror, 2/5/2024. This is mostly the same article as that under note 5, above, but with a different headline.
- 63 years out of 80 is almost 79%, but there are fewer people of advanced age.
- "What is the population of the United Kingdom?", Wolfram Alpha, accessed: 2/16/2024.
February 12th, 2024 (Permalink)
Apples Vs. Oranges
In the previous entry, we looked at a confusing bar chart presented recently on an MSNBC program1. The emphasis in that entry was on the chart itself, and not the underlying data, which we take up now. The data itself was quite simple: it purported to be the amount of cash that each of four candidates for president had on hand. Here it is in tabular form―we'll talk about the "Q3"s later:
Candidate | Cash on Hand |
---|---|
President Biden | $117M |
Donald Trump | $38M (Q3) |
Nikki Haley | $14.5M |
Ron DeSantis | $14M (Q3) |
It would have been far better if MSNBC had presented this information in a table such as this than in the misleading bar chart it used. Nonetheless, is this data correct? Is it really the case that Biden has over three times as much "cash on hand" as Trump? Where did these numbers come from?
Though the chart itself provides no information on the source of its data, the number for Biden appears to come from a press release put out by his campaign; here's how The Hill reports it:
The Biden-Harris reelection campaign announced on Monday it has $117 million on hand, in what aides claim is the largest sum for any Democratic candidate in history at this point in the race. … The total includes fundraising efforts by the campaign, joint fundraising committees and the Democratic National Committee.2
The same report goes on to state: "Republican candidate Nikki Haley announced her fourth quarter fundraising numbers this month, saying she raised $24 million, ending the quarter with $14.5 million on hand." So, this explains a puzzling aspect of the MSNBC chart, namely, why there was a "Q3" in parentheses after both Trump and DeSantis' data, but not after either Biden or Haley: the latter two candidate's numbers were based on end of the year―that is, fourth quarter―reports, whereas the former only on third quarter reports.
This fact already indicates that the chart compares apples to oranges, that is, the fourth quarter numbers of Biden and Haley to the third quarter ones of Trump and DeSantis. These were presumably the most recent numbers available, but the candidates' finances may have changed considerably in three months.
Not only does the chart compare the current numbers for Biden to outdated ones for Trump, but that for Biden includes cash from "joint fundraising committees and the Democratic National Committee [DNC]", whereas the number for Trump is only for Trump's campaign itself, and does not include money raised by the Republican National Committee (RNC)3.
What is the justification for this disparity? No doubt Biden is the presumptive nominee for the Democrats, but Trump is also the probable nominee of the Republicans, though neither candidate is the actual nominee yet. Trump may yet fail to be nominated, perhaps because of his legal problems, but the same thing could happen to Biden given his own legal and age-related difficulties. In any case, I can't see any good reason for including the DNC's money as if it belongs to Biden's campaign but treating the RNC's as separate from Trump's.
As a result, the data compares apples and oranges in both the reporting periods―that is, Q3 versus Q4―and in what is counted as "cash on hand". The end result creates the appearance that Biden has a much greater amount of money than Trump.
How much money do the Biden and Trump campaigns have at this point? According to The New York Times4, at the end of last year, Biden had $46M cash on hand while Trump had $33M. So, Biden is ahead of Trump but "not overwhelmingly", as The Times' headline puts it.
In the previous entry, I claimed that there didn't appear to be political bias underlying the chart itself, which was just too confused to benefit any particular candidate. However, the data underlying the chart does appear to be politically biased in favor of the Biden campaign, giving the false impression that Biden is way ahead of Trump in terms of money. This could reassure worried Democrats that the campaign can spend its way out of problems such as Biden's low approval rating5 and losing position in recent public opinion polls6.
It's reporting such as this that makes MSNBC simply appear to be a propaganda outlet for the Democratic party in general and the Biden campaign in particular.
Notes:
, 2/8/2024.