damned lies and statistics Archive

7

Australian journalists can’t count, can’t think

By
Josh
– 8 January 2012Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media

The Sun-Herald today revealed the shocking fact that the number of Australian tourists being arrested for crimes overseas has doubled in the past decade.

Bogans abroad. Photo: nineMSNThis plays into well-worn stereotypes about cashed-up bogans misbehaving drunkenly on football team trips to Bali, and a handful of recent, high-profile cases of Aussies charged with drug dealing, murder and espionage. Clearly we are meant to believe that our fellow countrypersons are going overseas and behaving badly — indeed much worse than ever before — or that foreign police increasingly putting Australians in the slammer at the slightest provocation.

Except. Has the number of Australians travelling overseas remained fairly static over the past 10 years? If so, this is a clear indication of growing boganisation of, or foreign law enforcement hostility to, Aussies. But if, say, the number of Australians going on overseas trips also doubled over the same period, then this statistic would be wholly unremarkable.

Let’s say 10 years ago, 100 Aussies went overseas and one was arrested. Then last year, 200 intrepid travellers boarded a Qantas jet for foreign shores and two were arrested. Whoop-de-fucking-do, you would have to say.

But for an overworked journalist writing a scare piece about how you’re twice as likely to end up being sodomised in Kerobokan Prison the instant you leave our fair shores, that’s all a bit of hard work.

If you Googled, say, ‘number of Australians travelling overseas‘ and clicked on the top link, you’d come to the Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 4102.0 – Australian Social Trends, Sep 2010 : Holidaying Abroad. Scroll down to the last chart on the page, ‘Total short-term arrivals and departures’, which I have copied here.

ABS: Total short term arrivals and departuresWhat this looks like to me is that in 2003, the number of Australians going overseas was a bit above 3 million, and in 2010 it was pretty close to 7 million. And thanks to a strong Aussie dollar, outbound tourism surged in 2011. So at least double. Probably quite a bit more.

So. Number of Australians being arrested overseas: double. Number of Australians going overseas: more than double. In other words, Australians are LESS LIKELY to be arrested overseas than they were a decade ago. Not more. Less.

Australian journalists make this kind of error all the time. They state a scary-sounding statistic without taking into account the population growth, inflation or a dozen other factors that provide context and usually rob the number of its shock power, because it actually shows that things are about the same or getting better.

That makes them either sensationalist or stupid. Either way, they’re doing a shit job.

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8

Australian journalists should give up and let someone competent have a go

By
Josh
– 8 December 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media, money, politics

Father Chris Riley, founder of charity Youth Off the Streets, drew some flak yesterday for appearing in a Clubs Australia flyer endorsing the clubs industry’s opposition to the Government’s proposed poker machine regulations.

Riley has been an enthusiastic supporter of the clubs industry for many years, and works in partnership with them to do good charitable work. The clubs, in return, have been enthusiastic supporters of Youth Off the Streets. But just how enthusiastic have they been?

To counter the criticism that Riley is a shill for the clubs, he came prepared with a statistic to show how minimal their involvement was. Clubs’ donations to the charity were variously reported as 0.5% of total donations or 0.2% of the total budget. Insignificant, right? In a radio interview with Adam Spencer, he said the figure was 2%. Funny that it’s not the same figure, but it’s still no big deal.

In his submission to the Productivity Commission’s gambling inquiry, Riley proudly revealed his charity had received more than $3.5 million in funding from the clubs industry in the eight years from its inception to the submission in March 2009. That’s about $435,000 a year. Suddenly it’s not such small change.

For this figure to be 0.5% of total donations, Youth Off the Streets would have to be pulling in around $87.5 million a year. Sounds like a lot. And it is. In the 2009 financial year Youth Off the Streets received $8.3 million in donations and $6.8 million in 2008. One assumes they were lower in previous years, rather than higher.

It took me about five minutes of Google and high-school maths to discover, by its own figures, Youth Off the Streets did not receive 0.5% of total donations from the clubs industry. In fact, it was more than 5%. (I’m indebted to blogger cyenne for the link to the Productivity Commission submission.) If someone threatened to take away more than 5% of your income, you’d think twice, wouldn’t you?

So let’s be clear. Riley is spruiking for the clubs industry and lying about the extent to which said industry bankrolls the charity he runs. The information that proves he is lying is publicly available and easy to find. Does any of this get a run in the Australian media? Of course not.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has used the Big Four banks’ current (at time of writing) silence about cutting interest rates in line with the Reserve Bank’s cash rate as an excuse to beat up the government.

“(The banks) should be passing on rate cuts in full,” he said. “That’s what happened under the former government.”

Is that right? Not according to George Megalogenis, who wrote in today’s Australian:

The banks have consistently short-changed home borrowers over the past decade. The pattern of meanness repeats whether the Reserve Bank is easing or tightening monetary policy – some of the cuts are held back, while the increases are passed on with a premium.

One of them has to be wrong. Who do you believe?

Aside from George Megalogenis’s very roundabout criticism of Tony Abbott’s statement, no one in the media appears to have questioned it. They all quoted what Abbott said, because he said it, and that’s news. But is it true? Not my department, say the journalists.

And here’s the point, Australian journalists. If your entire intellectual value is being able to cut and paste from press releases and prepared statements in an interesting order, you’re doing a bang-up job. But if your job includes things like checking facts and doing research, even to a small degree, you should all be sacked, because you’re really shit at it.

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0

Not so sceptical my brains will fall out

By
Josh
– 23 March 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, nerds, scienticians, wordy things

Tim Dean has written a wonderfully reasonable and thoughtful piece on why conservatives are more likely to be climate change sceptics. I am somewhat more suspicious of their motives.

As you can imagine, this article provoked a flood of outraged, incendiary, irrational commentary from conservative climate change deniers.

Indeed, many climate deniers say their inability to face the facts of human-induced climate change stems from the most enlightened spirit of scientific rigour and critical thinking. As commenter ‘Unconvinced’ puts it:

You forgot the most important attributes of conservatives – the ability to think for themselves, and self-determination. Most of us will try to look at the evidence for ourselves not just blindly follow someone claiming authority.

That’s right folks, we should tip our hats and thank our lucky stars for contrarian free-thinkers like Unconvinced who bravely stand against the tide of public opinion and overwhelming evidence in the pursuit of truth, justice, Australia and cheap electricity.

Isn’t it simply breathtaking how many of these  über-intelligent experts in assessing scientific evidence choose to grace us with their wisdom in online comments? And how they all say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, almost as though they’re reading from the same few sources?

You really have to marvel at the irony in the way they decry those who believe in climate change science as gullible sheep, even as they uncritically put their faith in unscientific climate-denier propaganda.

As Bernard Keane observes in Crikey:

Scepticism connotes a healthy willingness to be convinced if the evidence is sufficient, whereas of course no amount of evidence will ever convince critics of climate science, even as the evidence mounts and the numbers remorselessly add up to a warming planet. They’ll explain them away, make up their own data, reformat their graphs and cherrypick whatever data or explanations they can find — exactly as AIDS denialists and genocide denialists do.

Co-opting the language of scientific scepticism or contrarianism isn’t going to cut through the stench of those steaming piles of irony they’re trying to bury us under.

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1

The media’s credibility has already been nuked

By
Josh
– 16 March 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media, scienticians

The situation in Fukushima is either a dire, Chernobyl-like disaster that will render vast sections of the Japanese coast uninhabitable for centuries or a minor incident that demonstrates the safety of well designed nuclear power plants. Sometimes both at once, if you believe the media.

Journalists, of course, have no idea about how a nuclear power plant works and lack the skills to judge the accuracy of anything anyone says. They’re on fairly safe ground if they stick to reporting the latest facts – there was an explosion at this reactor; that reactor was on fire but now isn’t; this agency said that; that company said this. But when it comes to trying to make sense of what’s going on, it’s all just he said, she said.

Most people commenting on the nuclear power plant situation in Japan are not nuclear-energy experts. They tend to sensationalise the situation because they’re more likely to get on TV, sell newspapers, attract clicks that way.

Most nuclear-energy experts work for the nuclear-energy industry either directly or as consultants. They tend to downplay the situation because they earn a living from telling people nuclear energy is safe.

Who has the knowledge to decide if any of these people are being honest and accurate? How many journalists who know almost nothing about the subject matter would back themselves to question the credibility of a talking head who sounds like s/he knows what s/he is talking about?

The media is clearly failing in its mission to explain to the public What This Means, but it’s hard to imagine how they might do a better job of it.

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2

Sports coverage is not fascinating: newspaper proves how boring it is

By
Josh
– 25 February 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media

Last Sunday, the Sun-Herald (the Sunday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald) published its list of the 20 most fascinating people in sport. A fairly decent read all up, even if you might not have agreed with all the choices. That is, after all, the point of any top-x list, to get people to disagree with the publication’s picks.

Gai Waterhouse

Gai Waterhouse, not wearing a fascinator. Photo: Jenny Evans, SMH

As a companion piece, it published the 10 least fascinating people in sport – a photo gallery with bitchy one-liners captions like “dishwater is no longer the world’s dullest thing” and “let’s just say she needs to improve her image”. Not hard-hitting journalism, but a good page filler for a Sunday.

A good newspaper would give plenty of coverage to the fascinating people and pretty much ignore the unfascinating ones. You would think. So let’s compare the lists of most and least fascinating sportspeople with the number of times they were mentioned on the smh.com.au website, according to Google.

Read the rest of this entry »

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0

Stupid conservative numbers game is no proof of bias

By
Josh
– 24 August 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, government, media, wordy things

Gavin Atkins’s post on ABC’s The Drum is the latest in a line of conservatives playing stupid numbers games to ‘prove’ that the ABC (or some other media organisation) has an inherent left-wing bias. In fact, all it demonstrates is that Atkins and his fellow cultural warriors do not have the faintest clue about the purpose of journalism.

Atkins read through every article published on The Drum website during the election campaign and scored each individual sentence as follows:

Each time a value-laden remark was made about Julia Gillard (or her campaign) that was positive or negative, it was noted as G+ or G-. For Tony Abbott, it was given the value A+ or A.

Yup, that’s it. It’s all very well to call this system moronic or pathetically simplistic, but why?

Because it assumes that everything Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott did during the election campaign was equally credible or unbelievable and that all critiques or praises published on The Drum were equally fair. This is demonstrably not the case.

For example, every time Tony Abbott claimed interest rates would always be lower under a Coalition government than under Labor, this was:

  • Historically inaccurate, when referring to past governments
  • Completely impossible to prove or disprove, when referring to future governments

In other words, it was complete bullshit.

But if an article in The Drum criticised this comment, Atkins would give it an A-, thus confirming in his mind that the ABC was full of socialists.

The Atkins system also makes no differentiation between an article that criticised Julia Gillard for proposing a citizens’ assembly to develop a new policy on climate change – a dumb idea – and one that bitched about the Prime Ministerial earlobes or dress sense. Both would get a G- under this scale.

Being critical of politicians’ stupid ideas is a journalist or commentator’s job. If an article simply reports what a politician said without any analysis or comparison to reality, that is bad journalism. So is an article that ridicules a politician’s personal attributes.

To demonstrate bias, Atkins would therefore need to show not only that The Drum criticised one side or another more, but also that those critiques were unfair or unjustified. Otherwise, his results could just as easily be explained by the fact that Tony Abbott said and did a lot more stupid things that were worthy of criticism.

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4

Survey shows climate change scepticism has nothing to do with science

By
Josh
– 12 August 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, government, scienticians

The University of Queensland (UQ) surveyed more than 300 federal, state and local government politicians about their views on climate change. The headline figure: about 70 per cent believed in human-induced climate change and rated it one of the country’s most important challenges.

But when they broke this figure down by party affiliation, this is what emerged:

  • 98% of Greens said the planet was warming because of human activity producing greenhouse gases
  • 89% of Labor pollies agreed, along with
  • 57% of non-aligned politicians and
  • 38% of Liberal-Nationals.

This presents us with two complete WTFs.

  1. As Jeff Sparrow points out, there must be one climate sceptic in the Greens.
  2. Climate change scepticism moves almost entirely along party lines.

If there were a serious, legitimate scientific debate about climate change, this would not be the case.

There would be people from all partieswho would be convinced by either side of the argument. Of course, there would be some degree of bias along ideological grounds; Greens and Labor are traditionally more pro-environment while the Coalition tends to support business. But it could not possibly be so stark.

In reality, we have people automatically taking positions on a question of scientific debate based entirely on their political beliefs.

The only conclusion a thinking person can draw is that climate change scepticism is an entirely political movement, which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with ideology. It could not be more obvious.

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8

Population alarmists are always wrong

By
Josh
– 5 August 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, government, money, scienticians

In recent months, the issue of Australia’s population has become increasingly contentious. But those who advocate unpleasant measures to make our population more ‘sustainable’ are looking at the problem from entirely the wrong angle.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wholeheartedly supported the idea of a ‘big Australia’, with a projected population of 36 million by 2050. As a means of differentiating herself from her predecessor, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she wanted a “sustainable” population, although she has been unwilling to give a number.

In the current election campaign, the issue has devolved into a race to the bottom, with the Opposition claiming its population goals are even lower – thus more sustainable – than the Government’s.

At the same time, population-control viewpoints have been much more prominent in the media. Next week, the ABC will screen Dick Smith’s Population Puzzle, a documentary in which the entrepreneur will air his views on the potential dangers of Australian and global population growth.

Recently ABC News 24 interviewed Mark O’Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia, member of the Stable Population Party of Australia and a candidate for the Senate in the upcoming federal election. (Mark was also the celebrant at my wedding and I have a great deal of admiration for him.) Dick Smith bought a crateload of copies of Overloading Australia and posted them to all state and federal politicians and mayors around the country.

By limiting immigration, sustainable population activists aim to ensure Australia’s population will top out at around 26 million people. But even this may be too many; Professor Tim Flannery believes the long-term human carrying capacity of the Australian continent and Tasmania could be as low as 8 million people.

This notion of ‘carrying capacity’ – that we will simply run out of resources to sustain current levels of population growth – has been thoroughly discredited. Brendan O’Neill in Spiked provides an excellent summary.

Thomas Malthus was wrong in the early 19th century when he predicted “epidemics, pestilence and plagues” would “sweep off tens of thousands” if we didn’t get working-class birth rates under control.

Paul Ehrlich was wrong in the early 1970s when he predicted “hundreds of millions of people [would] starve to death” in India by 1980 or so.

Malthus and Ehrlich backed up their arguments with scientific-sounding factoids, but what actually drove their views was a deep hatred of other humans (those of lower class or darker skin, respectively) and a failure to grasp our species’ amazing ability to adapt and overcome problems.

This is why today’s green-tinged neo-Malthusians are wrong when they claim our current population growth is ecologically unsustainable, or can only occur at the expense of living standards. Despite the exponential growth of the world’s population, living standards are higher now than they have ever been in history.

They claim to eschew China-style coercive population control practices but fail to explain how education campaigns or handing out condoms could possibly achieve their goals, especially given the spread of anti-contraception religions across the developing world.

It is also a total failure of imagination to believe that even if we can’t solve all the potential problems of population growth with today’s technology, we will not find ways to do so in the future. History has shown, again and again, that we could and we did. There is no reason to believe we can not or will not in future.

As population grows, so do technology and society. We find ways to cope. We find alternatives to scarce resources. We come up with brilliant ways of feeding and housing ourselves and living with each other.

The fact is, we’re not doing those things well at the moment. We’re not developing renewable energy or building the infrastructure to cope with the pressures of population growth.

But to claim the answer to crowded trains or traffic jams or water shortages or even global warming is sealing off our borders or having fewer babies, rather than using all our intelligence and industriousness to fix the problems, smacks of a Luddite hatred of progress and a deep misanthropy.

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8

Twitter won’t stop the filter or win the election

By
Josh
– 3 August 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, f___ing censorship, government, media, nerds

Over the past year I’ve been having an ongoing argument with quite a few people who can’t understand why the Rudd-Gillard government has persisted with its internet filtering proposal since “everyone knows it’s a bad idea”.

I can’t argue with the ‘bad idea’ part, but the ‘everyone’ part is simply delusional. Yet many quite sensible people I speak to are genuinely bewildered that the filter is almost completely ignored by the mainstream media and barely registers on the radar of political debate.

(To be fair, the mainstream media’s reporting of internet censorship has been woeful and a prime example of what Jay Rosen calls “he said, she said journalism“, where a reporter simply records the opinions of opposing sides of an issue without subjecting their claims to any analysis. Most recently, on last night’s Q&A, Tony Jones only gave Small Business Minister Craig Emerson enough time to claim the government should filter all pornography that children shouldn’t see before shutting down the topic, preventing any debate.)

This is the kind of conversation I’m talking about:

renailemay: So let me get this straight. No #1 election issue on Twitter is the filter. And yet no questions from the floor during #ausvotes debate

vealmince: @renailemay Do you really not understand? Twitter is NOT the Australian public. It’s a tiny fraction of mostly like-minded people. #ausvotes

renailemay: @vealmince do you really not understand? Twitter is the Australian public. We live in Australia and we vote. Stop telling me I’m a minority

vealmince: @renailemay You and your 1000 mates. Either it’s not enough people, or you’re not organised enough to make a political difference.

Late last year, I argued that filter opponents were failing to cut through because they spent too much time agreeing with each other, debating nomenclature and deploying logic and sarcasm, rather than actual political lobbying, to sway the discussion in their favour.

But I think another factor at work is the inability of many in the twittersphere to see outside their small and mostly like-minded online social circle. This groupthink has led many online news outlets to publish polls finding that 95% or more of their readers were against an internet filter, unaware of or deliberately ignoring the massive selection bias inherent in asking that question to that audience.

The harsh reality is, even if everyone on Twitter thought and voted the same way, it would make no difference.

There are 13.9 million registered voters in Australia. There are 1.2 million Twitter accounts, of which no more than half could be active users who are eligible to vote. That makes 600,000 or about 4% of registered voters. It’s not a huge number, but 4% could gain a Senate seat, depending on how preferences fell, or swing the whole election.

Nice try. But of course, not all Twitter users would change their votes.

If Twitter is a representative sample of the Australian population (there are reasons to argue why it’s not), according to the latest polls, its users are split 50:50 on the two-party preferred vote. That means even if you could persuade every active Twitter user in Australia to vote for one party, it would only deliver a 2% swing.

But of course, you couldn’t get them all to vote the same way. Even though the filter is bad, some might argue that on the balance of all its policies, Labor is the less worse choice. Some of them might not care about the filter or, believe it or not, actually support it. (OMG, nowai!)

Still, a swing of less than 2% could be an election winner if Twitter users were disproportionately located in marginal seats such as western Sydney and the Brisbane suburbs. Whereas if a large number of Twitter users lived in safe seats, such as those in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, even a 4% swing would make no difference.

Which do you think is more likely?

The impotent rage many Twits feel about the political-media establishment’s nonchalant treatment of the censorship issue is palpable. But it’s merely a symptom of the increasing influence of numbers men, marketing wonks and political strategists who use business intelligence technology to slice-and-dice, drill-down focus on winning a dozen or so marginal seats. If the issue that arouses your passion is not one that boils the blood of the residents of those seats, you’re irrelevant to the political process.

Viva democracy.

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1

Significant growth in substantial uniqueness

By
Josh
– 12 March 2010Posted in: damned lies and statistics, marketroids, media, wordy things

In this marvellous post, Tim Phillips rails against the proliferation of meaningless filler words in media releases.

Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.

To demonstrate this, he searches through the Factiva database. He found the number of media releases containing words such as ‘significant’ and ‘unique’ has remained fairly constant since 2002. However, the number of media releases containing all four words – significant and substantial and meaningful and unique – has tripled.

Read the rest of this entry »

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