Our lives are filled with bad data and error-laden interpretations of good data.
Fifty per cent of all marriages end in divorce. You’re 15 times more likely to die from a falling coconut than a shark attack. A Lib Dem bar chart.
Even when the data is good, our institutions, from politicians to newspapers, often struggle to accurately communicate it. Sometimes the end result is benign – but this week, with the release of the ethnicity and religion data from England and Wales’s 2021 census, we have seen how it can cause harm.
