In NewScientist (15 August 2020) statistician David Spiegelhalter gives some clues on evaluating statistics:
There are tricks, but it’s not a simple thing. A lot of it is feeling, what I call “sniffing the number”. My first question is always “why am I hearing this number?”: to be sceptical about the motivations of the people telling you the number. Are they trying to make it big or small? Are they trying to persuade me, rather than inform me? Almost always they’re trying to persuade.
That leads to subsidiary questions. What am I not being told about? Can I believe this number? Where does it come from? Does it actually represent what I think it represents? It’s a bit like judging fake news. You often can’t tell from the claim itself; you have to look outside and see what other people are saying about it, do what’s called horizontal searching. That’s a very basic skill that you can teach people. It’s being taught in US schools now to show people how not be taken in by fake websites.
Great hints, and I think of this as required reading for any user of the Web.
