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Some other people have mastered the art of pulling numbers out of their ass. This is deadly common on commercial TV where marketers just say things like it improves your performance by 200% percent, or this vaccum sucks twice as good as the other brand. Marketers may have a basis for this number, but they certainly won’t explain them in their costly 30 second break, won’t they?

But commercial break at the time you get up and take a leak afterall, nevermind their content…

What is more worring is when the mainstream media starts throwing numbers around the same way as they are in marketing. This is not a rant about how statistics can be manipulated at anyone’s profit. I’m talking about the generally bad habit the media have to cite number that are totally meanlingless for people uninitiated to the source of the data, that is, most people.

You can compare that to shopping for something without any prior knowledge of the value of the item you are aiming to buy. You usually compare prices of similar items to discover the scale of the numbers. Yet, the media keep throwing at us numbers that are meanlingless for most people.

This is specially obvious lately with the swine flu scare, but as my friend Steven said, and as I will repeat below, we are not coughing up bacon yet.

Here are a few example of numbers cited with comparison, which means, that for most people they could as well have been pulled from thin air.

From CBC:“Around the world, the number of confirmed swine flu cases stood at 1,490, with 29 deaths related to the outbreak of the new H1N1 virus, Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general of the World Health Organization, said Tuesday.”

Like said above, the estimated number of death of regular flu every where, in US, is 36000. More people die of car bomb in Iraq, daily. Yes, Iraq is far away, but we can also ask ourselves if the deaths are directly or indirectly attributable to swine flu?

From Alternet.org:“the results of a study indicating that 200,000 two- to four-year-olds had been prescribed Ritalin for an “attention disorder” from 1991 to 1995.”.That certainly seems a lot, but it means nothing if I don’t know how many two to four-years old have not been prescribed ritaling.

Finally, you can find at various places that the Iraq War, or that fixing Global Warming, would cost trillions of dollars.

A trillion of dollar is a number very few people can size. You can’t look at anything in the world and say hey, this is worth a trillion bucks. Those numbers are so high that you can theorize that they are subject of heavy estimation, or obtained by calculation so complex that it makes the margin of error of the final result totally uncountable. Anybody can doubt the process by which such a number obtained, even if its by reputable persons or institutions. This weakens the position of whoever put forward such an huge number as an argument in a debate.

At this scale, people comprehend better if you say a shitload of money instead of whatever big number you calculated. Afterall, the shitload might be a relative quantity, but its near the top of the scale for everybody, from the poorest to the richest.