Doing the math

My sainted wife, Margie, is a biostatistician. That’s good, because while I have always admired the statistical arts, I’m darned bad at them, and Margie’s good at pointing out where statistics are used in a bad and/or misleading way.

So are the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) folks. They give out the “Dubious Data” awards annually to “journalists who mangled statistics and subverted science in the way they reported stories.”

The focus for 2001 was the media’s literal feeding frenzy over a set of shark attacks along the Atlantic coast.

The frenzy was extraordinary. According to a NEXIS search, there were a mere 58 stories about shark attacks in the U.S. print media in June. This increased tenfold in July to 592, and it rose again in August to 684. September was the month the story would have consumed all others, with 624 entries up to and including September 11. The advent of another dangerous but unseen villain stopped all that.
[…] What happened to produce all this attention? An eight year-old boy in Florida had his arm ripped off by a shark in July. Then two people were killed in North Carolina and Virginia within a few days. The last time two people had been killed by sharks in one year was in 1994. So 2001 seemed unusual, with two fatalities close together, and Virginia had never seen a shark attack fatality, while North Carolina had not seen one since 1957.

Of course, this was just a statistical blip, easy with such small numbers, but the media attention drew pundits who saw sinister patterns with no basis in fact, blaming everything from global warming to Bill Clinton’s fisheries policy.

And the final, crowning glory? There were, by the end fo the year, only 76 attacks and five fatalities in 2001 — down from 85 and 12 in 2000.

Good article. More people should read it than are likely to.

(Via InstaPundit)