Reading Statistics as Evidence, Carefully
Launch library · evergreen read
A number carries an air of certainty that a sentence of ordinary prose rarely manages on its own, which makes statistics both genuinely persuasive and genuinely risky to use carelessly in a piece of narrative writing built around evidence rather than assertion alone, however well intentioned the writer might be.
Understanding how a figure was actually produced matters considerably more than the figure itself when deciding whether it truly belongs in a piece of writing, since questions about who collected the underlying data, over what period, and using what specific method, all shape whether a number means what it first appears to mean.
Evergreen, evidence first writing generally favours explaining how a kind of measurement works in principle over quoting a single specific figure that could become outdated, contested or simply superseded, since the underlying mechanism behind a number often teaches a reader considerably more than the bare number ever could on its own.