"We find it very difficult to deal with... low numbers, one in a million, one in a billion... Once I have to start counting the zeros, all intuition and feeling goes. So it's hopeless, and of course we're bad at it. Why should we be good at doing that sort of thing? ...[I]t's more and more reported that people will use this expected frequency format, where instead of talking about... .03 per person year... What does that mean, for heaven's sakes. It's absolutely ridiculous scientific language for something. No, what you say is, out of 100 people... we would expect 3 for this to happen each year. ...You talk about a specific group of people, which you can... draw a... picture of... and that helps enormously. You... want to bring things to... whole numbers, small numbers, preferably between 1 and 100, or between 1 and 50... magnitudes that people have got a feeling for, and... no decimal places, no multiple zeros. You've got to get rid of all of that. You've got to get things to units people can understand, preferably on a scale of 1 to 10."
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Fellows of the Royal SocietyMathematicians from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandEducators from EnglandStatisticians
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David Spiegelhalter
Sir David John Spiegelhalter (born 16 August 1953) is a British statistician and a Fellow of . From 2007 to 2018 he was in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He is an ISI highly cited researcher and current Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the . In 2020 he joined the UK Statistics Authority board as a non-executive director for a period of three years, which was extended through to 2026.
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