How to answer your biggest questions—with data (w/ Mona Chalabi)
How to Be a Better Human
00:00
How to Avoid Statistics That Feel Overly Precious, Right?
If you hear something like 22.46% of Americans believe X, how is it possible to know to two decimal places what an entire country thinks? There's no way that every single person in the country was polled for their opinion on this thing. So a really important thing is to kind of question the denominator. If we're saying, I don't know, one in two Americans eat a ham sandwich every day, who was polled? And sometimes what you find is that the denominator, the people who constitute that research, all come from one specific demographic group such as Midwestern lorry drivers.
Transcript
Play full episode
