This is the core rule I learned as a researcher. More often than not, reputable journalists will get it more right than wrong on aggregate. On average, the numbers published by reputable journalists will be right and not misleading.
These are some interesting examples, however, the core rule: "One source is not evidence" is probably more important here to remember. Read a variety of sources and articles. I often find that sometimes in the same paper they will contradict numbers. Then I know, the editor missed it.
There are quite a lot of hidden singular sources and you have to be very wary of them. One such fake source is anything that gets leaked or comes out of government, it could be the very same person/source going to multiple news sites presenting multiple pieces of fabricated information. Its not uncommon for a lot of political news to be singular source, just because its on every news site citing multiple sources doesn't make it true.
The other possibility is a chain where manipulation can take place in a non obvious way. For example reviews of PC hardware like CPUs on release day. It might appear as if you are reading many different sites with differing review methods but in practice all of them were likely provided a CPU and motherboard by the same manufacturer chain. Both AMD and Intel have been caught in the past providing golden samples for reviews and motherboard manufacturers auto overclocking boards. SSD manufacturers providing MLC for review and then switching to TLC NAND once it hits retail. There are so many scandals that involve this sort of thing that its very hard to trust reviews that aren't retail sourced and recently too.
Reading multiple sources of news isn't enough, you have to analyse where it comes from and how it could have been manipulated and falsified based on where the chain of custody of the news item comes from, a much harder problem and largely impossible given how the news hides its sources.
True, you need to have a bit of a critical eye, good memory and reason from experience. It seems every hardware release promises the best and greatest. Such statements will be short lived because once many consumers start submitting their benchmark scores those tactics will be revealed.
Even the direction the number suggests can be completely wrong too. A lot of news is just propaganda at this stage, very little enlightenment comes from reading it. As has been argued quite a lot here on Hacker News its also not very valuable either, not knowing the news doesn't cause you much in the way of life problems since you will find out about the big things another way.
A more subtle example: the Washington Post gets COVID statistics from John Hopkins, which uses "date reported" for COVID cases instead of "episode date." This means percentage increase (or decrease) since a week ago can be wildly wrong when states backfill data, as they often do.
I haven't traced it but the New York Times and Google seem to have similar problems.
Usually it's better to look at the state's website or the CDC, but they have different dashboards that often don't calculate the same useful metrics for you.
The word "even" here in the title indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of just how bad the New York Times is.
If you are ever very close to the subject of a story, to the point where you know the important details, and then you see that subject get covered by the New York Times, you will see just how bad they are. Exceedingly, horrendously, tragically bad with facts, and trying to put an ideological spin on everything. But I'll grant that it's often less bad than some of the others.
OP here. I agree that there are a lot of problems with the Times' coverage; I deploy a heavy skepticism filter and I subscribe to various newsletters for perspective, analysis, and deeper coverage of topics I'm interested in. That said: do you know of a better source for general national (US) / world news? I haven't found anything that really strikes me as less problematic. I tried to leave after the Slate Star Codex mess, and failed.
The Chicago bureau chief being off by 6% in a tweet is an example of "exceedingly, horrendously, tragically bad?" The story clearly says "because of Covid."
The tweet's claim is "...the statistic is misrepresented. The 13% number only captures people who worked from home BECAUSE OF CORONAVIRUS." That's exactly what it says in the story.
And the weasel words don’t help here. Once the damage is done, a retraction cannot undo it.
Wen Ho Lee was in solitary confinement for nine months under threat of possible execution for things he did not do based in large part on drama whipped up (and never fully retracted imho, not that that matters one fucking bit for the nine months and other impacts on him and his family) by the early NYT reporting on his case.
reporting news from english sources in continental Europe, it happens that billion is incorrectly translated to billion instead of milliard, causing a factor 1000 to appear out of nowhere. (do your own math for trillions)
The one in the example may be a brain fart, but so many other errors could be prevented by standardizing a few things ... decimals and thousand sepatators is another one
Does Anybody actually use milliard? Here in the UK million is a thousand thousand, billion a thousand million etc. I always assumed that was the same for our mainland cousins.
Not in English, but most European languages use essentially the same words to describe numbers like 1 million and higher, except that some use the million/miliard convention and some the million/billion convention.
For example, in French, 1 million dollars is "1 milion de dolars", but 1 billion dollars is "1 miliard de dolars". Then, 1 trilion dollars is "1 billion de dollars", and a quadrillion dollars is "1 billiard de dollars".
As a crusader for the best solution, I think these are both wrong (as it should never have been this way). 10^6 should be billion, 10^9 should be trillion, etc. Then the prefix would match the number of 1000x multiplications.
I grew up in the UK. When I was a kid, 'billion' was ambiguous: it might mean 10^12 or 10^9. If the source was American you could be sure they meant 10^9.
Hear, hear. I keep being amazed how little sanity check is done when it comes to numbers.
I developed a rule of thumb over the years: if you can't Fermi estimate some metric or quantity within an order of magnitude, you probably don't understand the metric very well. If you can't estimate it within two order of magnitudes, you probably don't understand it at all.
I believe their mistakes are equally likely to be intentional as they are to be simple mistakes. Especially when it comes to topics where there is an agenda at play.
That's exactly something to look out for. As I mentioned in another comment, they aren't spreading falsehoods per se, they're just underrepresenting them; safe from lawsuits AND downplaying the pandemic.
But even factually correct numbers, presented neutrally, can still fuel an agenda. For example, most corona related articles focus on the number of deaths, but don't mention the number of cases nor the amount of people with long-term effects, nor the long term effects of e.g. the organ scarring that the 'rona can cause. It's deception - or downplaying - via omission.
To use the case in the example, what is the agenda for under-reporting, by an excruciatingly obvious 3 orders of magnitude, the number of Covid infections?
>> I believe their mistakes are equally likely to be intentional as they are to be simple mistakes. Especially when it comes to topics where there is an agenda at play.
> To use the case in the example, what is the agenda for under-reporting, by an excruciatingly obvious 3 orders of magnitude, the number of Covid infections?
It's the NYT's agenda to downplay COVID, obviously. /s
IMHO, misinterpreting mistakes as intentional lying is a common tactic to justify ignoring evidence and sources that contradict preconceived beliefs.
It's true that pretty much every kind of media is biased in some way, but I think a lot of people let the perfect be the enemy of the good and overreact to that fact by disengaging with certain reliable sources or with the media entirely. The ironic thing is that often results in relying on even more on biased and unreliable stuff, not less.
> I think a lot of people let the perfect be the enemy of the good and overreact to that fact by disengaging with certain reliable sources or with the media entirely
This is exacerbated by short-form social media applying higher point values to witty snipes at a piece over in-depth engagement.
I'm not speaking specifically about the examples the author provided, just the fact that the author actually lends any credibility to the NYT as being honest with any of their reporting in general. Maybe 10 years ago. Not today. The NYT of today is not the same that it used to be.
I'd argue this applies to all information, not just numbers. It is easier to point out incorrect numerical values than an esoteric and hard to communicate set of facts or circumstances. When it comes to modern journalism I see many problems:
1. Traditionally, editors write the headlines and sub heads. The editor knows even less about the subject than the writer so what are the chances they will get it right especially when their goal is not accuracy but attracting readers.
2. Twitter, the water cooler for all journalists, has put on public display and has quantified journalist relevance, popularity, and influence. Blogs did this to a certain extent but Twitter really put the gas to the pedal. Some news orgs force their journalists to use social media. This means that there are very real personal and career incentives to make the story fit the in-group narrative or be lambasted for it. This means that finding an angle on a story that highlights a specific narrative is the goal. To be clear the narrative is usually some worse case scenario that scares people and gets them to click. It doesn't have to be some sort of script handed down by a conspiracy.
3. Most people only read headlines and maybe the first few graffs. Often clarifying or information countering the headline is mentioned at the end of a piece. I often will read the end of an article first before subjecting myself to the manipulation found at the beginning of articles.
4. When success is about having clicks and shares there is a _strong_ incentive to publish stories before anyone else which is antithetical to carefully ensuring accuracy, integrity, and reason.
All in all, journalism is simply organized hearsay and I never automatically believe anything I am being told. That is not say it is useless, but it is important to understand its nature before consuming it.
Headlines are very bad places for truth. They're often written by rushed editors with less real-world reporting experience.
Because newspapers still often have to fit for space and are less likely to write multiple headlines for digital and print, there are constraints that often lead to rapid iterations and are far more likely to be out of sync with the article itself.
The problem is not that numbers can be wrong, is that they have been presented with such arrogance that everyone doubting or debating the numbers, and their actual wider impact, has to be banned and labeled a anti-science conspiracy lunatic
Language is an imperfect model for representing ideas. Million is close to billion, linguistically. Certainly not off by a power of 1000 in the space of language. I’m surprised the author is just coming to this realization.
If you can't trust language users to be accurate enough to represent a power of 1000, you can't really represent concepts which differ by a thousand, or by a thousandth!
There are times when people are communicating approximations and feelings, where imperfection is fine, and times when they're communicating precise, technical, numeric concepts where an imperfect model is insufficient.
It's imperfect if used inaccurately. The fact that the words million and billion is only one letter apart isn't really relevant IMO. I mean a single letter turns an innocuous word into a rude insult, which suddenly wouldn't be a simple mistake anymore.
It's not only about the letters. "Million" and "billion" are both numeric concepts. Numeric concepts are only a small subset of things expressible by language. So million and billion are close because they are spelled similarly and they deal with the same conceptual "thing." Duck and Fuck don't occupy the same conceptual category, so the distance between the two words is large despite being spelled similarly.
One interesting application of neural networks is the creation word embeddings. ML models are trained to place words in a vector space, which is useful for measuring distance between words, performing arithmetic on words, or finding the closet word. Using an embedding allows your to formalize the "distance" between words, and perform fun tricks like King + Woman = Queen.
>> So million and billion are close because they are spelled similarly and they deal with the same conceptual "thing.
Citation needed. Is this based on any sort of formal linguistic/anthropological reasoning or just like, your opinion?
Also, the article's whole point is "people are bad at numbers" and your argument that "linguistically, all numbers close" isn't really true. Why don't rhyming words in English feel "close"? Also, "duck" and "fuck" are both verbs involving a thing you would do with your body, so why isn't that closeness?
If you're going to point out that language feels arbitrary by making arbitrary points, you're going to be "right" but you're not actually saying much. Language can be both specific and arbitrary (it's a means of expressing both objective and subjective concepts) so an argument in favor of doing your best when seeking to be objective seems pretty reasonable.
I'm not making an arbitrary point. The end of my comment mentions word embeddings, which are learned from analyzing language and its usage in an unsupervised manner. You can use a word embedding to measure similarity between words. For instance, I just downloaded a pre-trained model of Stanford's GloVe embedding that was trained on 840 billion (yes, billion with a b) tokens. The cosine similarity can be used to measure how close two words are in the embedding. The cosine similarity of million and billion is 0.89. The similarity of duck and fuck is 0.27. The data indicates million and billion are much more similar than duck and fuck.
This result is intuitively obvious to me, which this article illustrates. Even if the resulting sentence is not factually true, a true-sounding sentence can be constructed by taking a sentence with the word million and replacing it with the word billion (in a majority of cases). This isn't true with duck and fuck, and duck is a noun and a verb used in generally different contexts than the word fuck.
> [...] exceeded half a million known virus cases.
> “Half a million known virus cases”, huh? During the Omicron peak, the US alone exceeded that many cases every day. Clearly they meant half a billion.
I wonder if the New York times knew exactly what they were writing. Both of course are technically correct. And billions/trillions/etc get into unfamiliar/meaningless territory for some with a million being the largest meaningful number so could have more emotional impact as a headline.
> Language is an imperfect model for representing ideas.
That may be so. But, the New York Times can't use that as a excuse for making simple mistakes, nor do I think it wants to. Language is primarily what it relies on to represent ideas. Accurate description of the world through language is the core of its value proposition to subscribers.
In languages that use short scale, you say "milliard" to mean "billion". You say "billion" to mean "trillion". It's very confusing and a frequent source of errors in translation. Every time I see the Czech word for "billion", I have to think about whether they mean 10^9 or 10^12.
I'm not sure this would help. The error was likely in thinkspace, not a literal typo. The real problem is when people toss around numbers without deeply understanding them. I don't think there's any simple fix for that. You simply can't reliably funnel information through a channel as narrow as a single number, nor the equivalent short phrase of number words.
The sad thing is people I know would tell you the COVID number is _overcounted_ because anyone dying while having COVID is counted as a COVID death.
That is true, but not enough to change the numbers and certainly not enough to make up for the uncounted cases. But when these media outlets get the numbers wrong, it bolsters these ideological positions built around “they’re lying to you”.
> That is true, but not enough to change the numbers
By definition, if the counting methodology is wrong (in the misleading sense), then they necessarily DO “change the numbers”
> and certainly not enough to make up for the uncounted cases
The uncounted cases aren’t deaths. Therefore it’s not a question of “making up for” those cases.
In fact, if anything, that makes it worse.
Using a singular value “total number of deaths” is generally misleading when trying to justify public health policy on large populations. A global population of 7-8 billion means that even huge numbers can be insignificant, eg 1 million over 8 billion is only 0.0125%. (Disclaimer: Numbers chose at random; this example does not represent any actual statistic around COVID).
If the cases are being overestimated then it drives the overall impact down.
Numbers and methodology both matter intensely when we’re talking about using the numbers to justify public policy changes.
I stated that lazily. If we counted hospitilizations (which I would argue is the number that matters), then they would tell you that those are overcounted because many people go into the hospital with COVID, but that's not what they are there for and many more contract it while there. But the number makes it sound like all those folks are in the hospital BECAUSE of COVID.
Something I find wonderful about the OP is that the emphasis is on the humanity. It's not that the news outlet is lying, it's that they are human and making a very human mistake. The OP's argument is that, even when the human working with numbers has the best intentions and plenty of relevant experience, it's really easy to fall victim to the "numbers are objective reality" fallacy.
It is entirely plausible that cases are under counted and deaths are over counted.
The thinking goes that if someone is just a little sick they aren't going through the hassle of getting an official test and being counted. If someone is nearing deaths door they are going to take action and go to the hospital or clinic so you're likely to have a very high percentage of cases leading to death being reported. Add on to that the fact that people who died in a car accident and happened to have a non-symptomatic case of covid was added to the death numbers. That might not be a huge number but it will have an effect at some level. I don't see how it could not unless you completely ignore them.
Inaccuracies in data can cut in all directions. In this case though, over counting deaths and under counting cases (a deliberate choice made by the CDC) made the virus seem more deadly than it likely was at the time.
Is there a plausible argument for an under count of deaths? If so, I have not had the pleasure of hearing it.
One of the fringe benefits of being a programmer is that if you try, you can start developing an intuition for how things across a huge span of orders of magnitude add together. That chart alone covers 8-and-a-bit orders of magnitude differences for simple operations, and then we may want to perform those operations thousands or billions or quadrillions of times.
I don't do super-high-performance systems, but I still encounter coworkers in our normal routines who are off in the mental models by multiple orders of magnitude w.r.t. to how much something should cost. I see overestimation more often than underestimation.
(My opinion on that is that if you "think" a database query should take 50ms, when it actually does you don't worry about it and dig into why. When the answer is, you're missing an index and doing a table scan for something that ought to be 5 microseconds, a full 4 orders of magnitude difference, it's easy to not notice, because in absolute, human terms, 50ms is still pretty fast. Make a dozen or two of those mistakes, even in otherwise very large systems running lots of code with a lot more than a dozen things going on, and it's easy for overestimates to become self-fulfilling prophecies and to accidentally build systems bleeding out orders (plural!) of magnitude performance without realizing it. Underestimates are much more likely to slap you in the face and get resolved one way or another.)
Another example: I'm a fan of time-tested wisdom of all sorts, but sometimes time does move on and invalidate things. "It all adds up" used to be true when everything we humans dealt with was in the same rough orders of magnitude, but it's not always true anymore. It doesn't always all add up. If I've got a 500ms process, do you have any idea how many nanosecond things it takes to even bump that by 1%, let alone add up to anything significant? If your "1ns"-range code has effectively no loops, or is O(n) on some small chunk of data or something, it's inconsequential. There's plenty of other places in the modern world, which spans more orders of magnitude than the world used to, where this time-tested wisdom can be false, and it in fact does not "all add up".
This is one of the reason you must always profile your code if you want to improve performance. People have always not always been perfect at finding bottlenecks even when our machines didn't casually span 12 orders of magnitude, but any developer no matter how experienced can be tempted to blame the complicated code dealing in microseconds but miss the simple-looking code hiding milliseconds.
This covers mostly the first bit of the article, but if you practice this sort of sense can start helping with a lot of the other innumeracy issues encountered too. We have good practice grounds for this in our discipline.
Is all adds up still. Just some “its” add up to a lot more than others.
I agree with your point. I’ve spent way too much time responding to code reviews where the reviewer asks me to be more efficient in something that takes triple digit nanoseconds per request on internal systems that typically get dozens of requests per day.
I would love a version of this classic xkcd that covers events that take nanoseconds and milliseconds [0]. I suppose it would have to also account for the difference in value between a human’s time and a machine’s unless you assume there is a human waiting in real time for every process to finish.
My version of this "any number is a warning sign" is: if someone is writing an article about a court case and doesn't include the docket number (so you can look up the history and new filings yourself) and PDFs of the documents (so you can see for yourself), assume you are being misinformed.
Same with any reporting about a police report that doesn't include a ... copy of the police report.
I hate this. Sometimes I have to spend an hour tracking down the actual case in PACER or something so I can read the actual opinion rather than the summary that is in the article.
Under the title “Serious Professionals Get It Wrong All The Time” there is a picture of a misaligned road/bridge. Does anyone know if this is a real picture? If so, what is the story and how did they fix it?
This reminds me of a example that happened just a couple days ago. The White House tweet that 70 percent of the inflation in March was due to Putin. That makes you think Putin is causing a lot of the March 2022 over March 2021 inflation number reported, which was 8.5%. However the inflation number they compared was March 2022 over February 2022, which was only 1.2% inflation of which 70% is a small much smaller effect and also was a relatively short term jump because markets thought the sanctions were going to be much stricter and bid up the prices in March and prices of many Russia produced goods have lowered some already after that expectation was reversed. This type of confusion is cause us to wrongly assess what is causing inflation or at least what is causing the biggest impact and our only hope is that the policy makers are actually reading these things correctly and able to make decisions but simply informing the public in unclear ways.
Lies, damned lies and statistics? Seems like an example of that.
I mean the "at least half a million" figure is not factually incorrect, it's just... misinformation? Downplaying, either intentionally or accidentally? Same as the "probably more" line, it's downplaying a fact by adding a bit of insecurity. It's an ass covering opening paragraph.
Indeed! It's amazing how often people just simply don't care.
Trader Joe's, for instance, makes signs for their produce with crazy prices. Five bananas for a penny! Yes, you read that right! They either don't understand decimal places, or they don't realize that it's not legal to advertise incorrect prices.
Their signs clearly say .19¢. I pointed it out to them, and they looked at me like I'm crazy.
Perhaps they'll care when I insist they sell them to me for that price, then complain to the county's Office of Consumer Affairs if they don't.
Ha, never heard of this before. I had to hunt the audio down (found it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU) but it was definitely worth it. Very funny! Thank you!
Perhaps they'll care when I insist they sell them to me for that price, then complain to the county's Office of Consumer Affairs if they don't.
I don't know about American law, but here in the UK you would lose that complaint. A price label is what is known as an "invite to treat", and a store is under no obligation to sell the item to you at that price. If they say it's a mistake they can and you have no right to say otherwise.
Interesting, looks like laws differ in subtle ways for these kind of agreements. For reference in the Netherlands any offer you make is legally binding, though the deal has to make at least some sense to both parties (as well as satisfy a few other conditions).
A price of 1/5 ct would probably be considered too low to be sensible and would not be considered binding.
American Law is almost universally the opposite - HOWEVER it doesn't completely unlimit it - you'll see signs at grocery stores that say something like "in the event of a price error, the store must give you the item at the listed price refund the difference"
For example, Wisconsin:
98.08 Price refunds; price information. (1) A person who uses an electronic scanner to record the price of a commodity or thing and who sells the commodity or thing at a price higher than the posted or advertised price of that commodity or thing at least shall refund to a person who purchases the commodity or thing the difference between the posted or advertised price of the commodity or thing and the price charged at the time of sale.(2) A person who sells a commodity or thing and who uses an electronic scanner to record the price of that commodity or thing shall display, in a conspicuous manner, a sign stating the requirements of sub. (1).
Presumably any legal system would treat the intent as the primary relevancy. In this case it is abundantly clear what the intent was (note that even the person complaining gives an explanation for what the store intended and thus is clearly not at all confused about the intent).
That sounds impossible to deal with. So you pick your groceries based on price presumably and then when you get to the register they can be something totally different? So as they are getting rung up you would have to say "no thanks for that one, please put it back" on every price you are not in agreement on?
Considering the recent news that online groceries can change prices (even dramatically) after you've ordered them, so supermarkets apply prices on the day of delivery, and you're on the hook for any difference... this doesn't surprise me one bit.
That's an interesting take. So the implied intent is more important than their actions, even after (or particularly after ) they're told they've made a mistake and asked to fix it?
You are a bad person for doing this. For using the law for personal whimsy instead of remedying or preventing real harm to people. Grow up. Life isn't an internet joke.
If it's just a mistake then they are not bound to sell it for that price. Especially if everyone else can easily recognize it as a simple mistake of where the decimal is.
> The store must honor the price in the advertisement, even if it is wrong, until they correct the misrepresentation using the same advertising medium and/or by corrective signs in the store.
> Items sold in a grocery store must ring up at the lowest displayed price. Food stores that are in the waiver program must offer consumers one of the items free if it scans higher than the lowest advertised price.
Which interpretation is idiotic? Being able to take in complex signals from the environment and form an instructive opinion is the foundation of human ingenuity. Given that the bananas obviously aren't on sale for $0.0019, it seems idiotic to me ignore alternative explanations for the sign.
>> Given that the bananas obviously aren't on sale for $0.0019, it seems idiotic to me ignore alternative explanations for the sign.
"It's a banana Michael. What could it cost, 10 dollars?!"
You say "obvious" but I don't think that means what you think that means. Why is it obvious? Why would it be impossible that a store sells bananas at a loss in order to pull people in (what people in sales call a "loss leader")? If you don't buy bananas regularly, why couldn't you assume this is just a great deal?
If there were a sign advertising 5 bananas for a penny (or whatever) with no asterisk, fine print, or mention that "terms may apply", I would be livid if I couldn't take advantage of that price.
I'm only speaking from my own personal experience, but I've never seen bananas priced at less than 1c each in the grocery store. I've also seen people misplace decimal points frequently. So, based on the thousands of times I've been to dozens of grocery stores, I'm using pattern matching to deduce that almost assuredly it's more likely that a banana listed as costing "0.19c" refers to $0.19 not $0.0019. If you ever encounter a true sub-cent banana in a retail supermarket, feel free to reach out to me and I'll be the first to admit I was wrong.
I've frequently (more than once a year) seen "Free pound of bananas" coupons as part of circulars/loyalty coupons at supermarkets I've been to (sometimes not even requiring further purchase). I've worked in advertising and marketing for checks watch years and am familiar with all sorts of different offer types and sales models. Free or Nearly Free bananas would seem relatively reasonable, and if I didn't frequent the store enough to know they always have a "cute" sign with nonsense prices, I would still be livid if the price wasn't honored.
TL;dr- Don't put up bullshit pricing signs and assume people will understand the "joke", you're coming from a place of different cultural awareness and it will burn you when people like me get involved.
The website is an explanation of the law, not the actual law itself. I'm sure the actual law does not require sales tax to be included in the displayed price.
State sales tax laws are all over the place; in many states the general idea is "don't tax necessities" which leads to silly things like buying a sandwich is tax free (like socks in Minnesota), but if you ask them to warm up the sandwich BEFORE sale it is taxed. If you ask them to warm up YOUR sandwich after sale, it's tax-free.
IANAL but I did spend the past year working for a company that generated and printed strips and sale tags for several major retailers across the US. We had to be pretty careful with our security because if someone accessed our system and generated a sale tag offering high-end items for $1 our customers (stores) would be obligated to sell the item for the price displayed on the sign/tag.
ok so as I understand it .19¢ must be 19% of a penny, 19 * 5 is 95, so 95% of a penny. If you add sales tax to that, if your state has one, doesn't that come out to 5 for a penny? Are you being facetious or is .19¢ the same as $.19 and my base expectation is wrong?
This left me wondering: if Trader Joe's were forced to stick by their written price, how would they go about charging you the fraction of a cent? Is that even possible?
Commodities are often quoted down to very small fractions of a cent, depending on what it is; you round using the normal mechanisms or have a separate agreement.
Trader Joes could sell for .19 cents and require a minimum purchase of ten pounds, for example.
That's a tad pedantic. They add the . so people immediately know its not $29, and that it's a low number. No one sells things for decimals of a penny. I think they gain more legibility than they lose on average by writing it that way.
That's how many people write 19 cents. For some people a decimal point is the thing that goes between dollars and cents. Yes, not a very rigorous system, not something you'll see in engineering or science, but something I see on shop signs.
And not just numbers. The overwhelming majority of the times I look up a reference cited in a wikipedia article, it turns out to not at all support the wikipedia text. Very often, when the wikipedia text seems murky, whoever cited the reference didn't understand the source document at all. I guess numbers never seem murky like that, so you don't get those same warning signs as with vague prose.
I'm not a journalist but I do sympathize with these types of mistakes in the media. Journalists have two essential parts to their roles: (1) understand the topic, (2) communicate the topic. The issue that comes up again and again is that journalists are not really qualified to do (1). Many issues and topics that journalists report on require expertise, a PhD, or just years of investigation to deeply understand.
Compounding the difficulty is that journalists report to non-experts in two ways. Their direct bosses are other journalists. Their indirect bosses are the consumers of media, 99.99% are non-experts. If 99.99% of your customers don't know or care about the details you will naturally put less attention towards the details.
We need to stop pretending that reading/watching/listening to the news is somehow informative or educational. Every piece of journalism is, at some level, fiction trying to masquerade as non-fiction. One way to fix this is to encourage more experts to directly communicate with the public. This has the opposite problem, since most experts are not skilled at communicating their expertise to a wide audience. Ultimately a healthy society requires a balance of the two. I'm firmly in the camp that we currently have too many non-experts trying to communicate expertise.
This is a great point! I still don't think this excuses it though. I think a journalist has a responsibility to at least know the limits of their understanding and not try to exceed that with numbers they don't understand. The author of the mask example about New Zealand could have stopped with the headline, as that's the only news-worthy part: Masks are required for two more weeks on public transit.
This is spot on because if anyone here is an expert in any field or had first hand knowledge of an event, then they have seen the complete misunderstandings pushed to non experts via articles.
This is the core rule I learned as a researcher. More often than not, reputable journalists will get it more right than wrong on aggregate. On average, the numbers published by reputable journalists will be right and not misleading.
These are some interesting examples, however, the core rule: "One source is not evidence" is probably more important here to remember. Read a variety of sources and articles. I often find that sometimes in the same paper they will contradict numbers. Then I know, the editor missed it.