The Covid pandemic taught me a lesson about big numbers – you should not rely on them without validating the source of the data. When you dig just a little bit deeper behind the numbers, you will often discover the numbers are estimates, extrapolations from a small sample size, attributed erroneously as “hard data” and often, completely made up.
A prime example happened when I looked into how the CDC calculates the annual number of cases and deaths from the flu for the US. They use a small sampling from hospitals then estimate US totals by applying 3 calculations to extrapolate this to the entire US population. In other words – they guess!
I think a lot about statistics, numbers and data all the time.
We had ~331 Million people living in the US according to the 2020 US Census. There is no way this number is accurate. I am certain that many people living here were not counted in that total. This includes illegal immigrants, criminals, homeless people and people who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) complete the census. I assume the census bureau uses some kind of formula to account for these people. I suspect they add a % or a multiple to the numbers.
In other words, they make their best guess.
The highest I’ve ever counted, sequentially, is probably under 200 when I was rolling pennies into wrappers from a piggy bank.
I have never counted anything close to a million. Even counting to 100,000 with one number every second would take over 24 hours. It seems unfathomable that I could do this without mailing a mistake. Counting to a million would require doing this for more than 11 days.
That makes me rethink every large number that gets fed to me from books, news, videos, government, historians, marketers, corporations, pollsters and pundits. How could they possibly be accurate?
They can’t.
So instead of considering large numbers to be accurate, I sometimes consider trends over time. If something was measured (aka estimated/guessed) in the same way over time, perhaps the trend can tell me something.
But realistically, I have no idea if the same calculations for making these estimates were used or not. Nor am I convinced that different people doing the work were accurate or didn’t make mistakes.
I no longer pay much attentions when someone declares that “millions” of people think something, are doing something, will be affected by something, etc. These are usually just headlines that are trying to capture my attention.
Instead, I pay attention the people around me.
According to the US census bureau, my hometown of Raleigh has a population of 469,000 people and the metro area’s population is 1,500,000.
According to my contacts list on my phone, I interact with 50 or so of these people on a regular basis and perhaps another 50 infrequently. During my travels around the neighborhood, I see hundreds more walking, driving, working and shopping.
All told, I’ll guess the total people I see or hear in a year is in the low 1000s.
That’s a number small enough for me to comprehend.
And, just like the big numbers, at best, it’s a guess.
