Everyone Gets Numbers Wrong, Even the New York Times
19th April 2022
Climateer blows the whistle.
My topic for today: All numbers are wrong.
Like, seriously. Whenever you see a number – in a tweet, newspaper headline, office email, technical report, textbook, anywhere – assume it is wrong. Treat it as enemy misinformation, deliberate sabotage of your understanding of the world, and disregard it.
You’re thinking, ha ha, I’m exaggerating for effect. I’m not. Seriously I am not. I mean, of course not not all numbers are literally incorrect; but it happens so very, very much more often than your intuition, that I do literally mean it is a good practice to treat all numbers as incorrect by default.
I’ve come to this position slowly, over the years, one screwup at a time. But now that I’ve really started paying attention, the mistakes are everywhere.