I've recently read "Bad Science", Ben Goldacre's entertaining dissection of the alternative medicine industry and the bad practices of the pharamcuticals industry. I'm also part of the way through Simon Singh's similarly themed "Trick or Treatment".

The trouble (or maybe the advantage) of reading this kind of stuff is that you can't stop noticing examples all around you when you have read it.

For example there is a report that I have heard on TV at least half a dozen times today which says, in various paraphrases, "men are up to 70% more likely to die of cancer than women."
The suggestion is that this is a) terrible and b) due to men's lifestyles.
The trouble is that the bare statistic is entirely meaningless unless they give a lot more information with it. We need to know what they mean by 70% more likely. We need to know if they are talking about men who have cancer being more likely to die than women who have cancer or do they mean men and women from the whole population.
On its own the bald statement is undecipherable.

For example, if 1 woman in 1000 dies of cancer then this figure means that slightly less than two men in a thousand do. Whereas if 100 women in 1000 die of cancer then 170 men do. Rather more significant.

If we are talking about the number of cancer patients who die (rather than the number of people who die of cancer), the maths gets more complicated because we would need to know the incidence of cancer in male and female populations as well as the actual relative sizes of those populations before the statistic becomes meaningful.

This imprecise use of mathematical language isn't hard to understand - it arises because journalists need a short quick way of saying things without giving long explanations and most of them probably don't understand that their statistics are, as presented, completely meaningless.

And that's before we look at the intuitive leap that says it's down to lifestyle differences.

I must look up the actual research paper and see what it really says.

Yes, I agree that so often the stated statistics are not meaningful. Sometimes it's deliberate (such as in "How To Lie With Statistics"), but often it is not.

I am interested, though, in your phrase "...the maths gets more complicated..." The "maths?" Or did you mean "the math?"

I meant "maths" which is he only abbreviated form in use in the UK. "Math", the American form is NEVER used here.

quote:

I meant "maths" which is he only abbreviated form in use in the UK. "Math", the American form is NEVER used here.

Though we accepted its use by the amazing Tom Lehrer in his lines (from My Home Town, I believe):

"The guy who taught us math
And never took a bath..."

quote:

I meant "maths" which is he only abbreviated form in use in the UK. "Math", the American form is NEVER used here.

It's interesting that we say "sports" and "math" in the U.S., and you in England say "sport" and "maths."