The meaning of words and statements

The saying “There are  three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics …” has been around for a long time.

For the purposes of this post I looked it up on the internet and it seems that nobody really knows who or where it originated – apparently Mark Twain, who was one of those who espoused and popularised it, claimed that it was first mentioned by Benjamin Disraeli, but de facto there is nowhere in his known works or recorded utterings that it appears.

Anyway, it’s out there.

Furthermore, (and this is, of course, a truism) our perceptions of things – the human race’s, I mean – tend to change over time. I should probably break my statement down slightly by applying it to individual cultures and – in my specific case today – to all things British.

There was a time when Britons believed, as night followed day, that our history and standards of behaviour and attitude – built up and passed down through the generations over time – were not only as near as dammit the pinnacle that any reasoning community could devise in terms of principle, logic and fairness but also the envy of the world.

At least, you could say that.

Or could have.

Let’s take the dissemination of information.

At one stage the BBC was automatically the world’s “go to” broadcaster when it came to news.

Not only did the average Brit take every word put out by “Auntie” as gospel – but so did the remainder of humanity, listening intently to their ropey old transistor radios in their mud huts, shanty towns and Johnny Foreigner capital cities.

Or so we smugly liked to think, imagining that none of them could trust anything their own rulers put out on the airwaves so – naturally – when they wished to know what was really happening they waited with bated breath for what the BBC World Service told them.

And yet. The BBC was never actually the inherent custodian of impartial, straight-down-the-middle news … “tablets of stone”, nailed on truth – if you wish to put it that way.

It’s great, of course, if and when you can obtain a reputation for total integrity and automatic (unswerving) truth-telling.

In fact, it’s a positive advantage – your Government, your rulers, even your own News & Current Affair department can be used by “the powers that be” – they’d argue “at times of national or international necessity” – to put out completely false news wit the same style and certainty as they put out their normal, “impartial”, output on other matters.

War-time immediately springs to mind as a case in point.

At times of extremis such as that you may – in the cause of the greater general good – have to suspend your commitment to the truth.

For example, telling the British population on the summer of 1940 the truth that – on any balance of probabilities – the greatest likelihood was that by the end of the year Hitler and his close circle would be parading down The Strand in a cavalcade of open-topped cars with legions of Nazi stormtroopers goose-stepping in unison behind them was hardly going to help the war effort.

That’s why recently I wasn’t surprised in the slightest recently to learn that Boris Johnson didn’t impose the first UK Covid-19 pandemic lockdown until as late as 23rd March 2020 because “the science” (or perhaps rather that should be “the academics who study crowd/population behaviour”) had advised that the earlier you imposed a lockdown, the quicker ordinary folk would get fed up with it and stop obeying its restrictions.

There are so many situations in which – in terms of dealing with any population and any worthwhile “end game” in a specific crisis – you have to “drip-feed”, or get them gradually used to an understanding of what is going to be required, to get where you eventually want to go.

In essence maybe it all comes down to subjectivity. Just as one man’s meat is another’s poison, one man’s truth can be another’s pack of lies.

And, of course, when you factor in the internet, the “Dark Web”, hundreds of thousands of hackers (private, criminal or state-sponsored) and all those who try to manipulate ordinary people because the means to do so are available and easy to use, you’re soon into the realms of “Fake News” … and then those who need or wish to peddling anything necessary to  achieve their goals, whether they be winning a political election or making untold millions of profit for themselves.

Today I spotted two media stories on the internet which rather illustrate the points I’m making.

The first is an item spinning off the recent (real or imaginary) concerns over the efficacy and/or “blood clot” dangers of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

Put basically, a small number of people who’d had the vaccine also developed blood clots … and the battleground was whether the vaccine itself had caused them as a side effect, or whether these had been just a perfectly natural and totally unconnected random occurrence.

Here’s a link to a piece by Sam Blanchard (Deputy Health Editor) and Connor Boyd (Assistant Health Editor) that appears today upon the website the Daily Mail. I would refer Rusters in particular to the table that appears to the right of the text as it begins.

See here – DAILY MAIL

The second is a review in the same newspaper of a new book by Tom and David Chivers called How To Read Numbers [W &N, £12.99, 208 pages] which makes some fascinating and worthwhile points as to why the exact context (and indeed sample sizes) of statistical surveys and conclusions need to be taken into account whenever anyone is considering the meaning and effect of their “findings” …

See here for a link to the relevant article by Nick Rennison that appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL