During the LA wildfires in January, Green Blob outfit World Weather Attribution was quick to put out a report blaming climate change. But now one of the authors has admitted the result was "not statistically significant".
It is a sad reflection on our age that the line 'lies, damned lies and statistics' was forgotten, says Prof James Alexander. Good political sense can never be grounded on statistics, but only on history and criticism.
One figure that has been repeatedly cited in the grooming gangs debate is that 1 in 73 Muslim men in the town of Rotherham has been prosecuted for grooming gang offences. However, this figure is slightly misleading.
Is probability all in the mind, as the Bayesians say, or does it tell us about the real world as well? Will Jones delves into the mind-bending twists and turns of how our brains make sense of the uncertainties we face.
73 teams of social scientists were invited to take part in a study where each team tested the same hypothesis using the same data. What happened? Results varied hugely and absolutely no consensus emerged.
