Psychologists got hold of this lovely idea of why we're trying to do it. I don't care what people do, so I'm not trying to change what they do, parti… - David Spiegelhalter
" "Psychologists got hold of this lovely idea of why we're trying to do it. I don't care what people do, so I'm not trying to change what they do, particularly. ...It would be nice if they could remember it... get the gist of something... learn something, but I don't even care too much about that. Psychologists have got this great scheme of what, perhaps, we're really trying to do, which is trying to breed some immunity to misleading anecdote, which is... the fact that we're so influenced by idiotic stories we hear on the web, or from our friends and neighbors.
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About 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.
Also Known As
Birth Name:
David John Spiegelhalter
Alternative Names:
David J Spiegelhalter
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David J. Spiegelhalter
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Sir David John Spiegelhalter
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That change in life expectancy is not that gripping in itself. So what we've done in the book, it does seem a rather a strange thing to say... "Over an adult lifetime, about... 50-60 years... take a year off your life." It's like losing roughly 1/50 of your life. It's actually because of... these daily habits... like losing a week every year of your life, the same as losing 1/2 hour off a day. So we could say... that... 2 hours watching television... it's as if it's taking 1/2 hour... off your life. ...You're aging an extra 1/2 hour sitting on your backside watching television ...
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s are disastrous. ...Relative risks are deeply misleading. They're a manipulative form of communication. To ever say, "Oh, this doubles your risk, or increases your risk 50%," absolute No-no! They are hopeless. In some situations they can be very valuable... but in general, medical things what... should be always given... s... with and without something... Like my s... I was getting... 15%, 10 year risk: 15 out 100 people like me might expect to have a heart attack or stroke. So I... roughly halved it... only in terms of relative risk... from 15% to 7-8%. ...Being told it halved it does sound good, but if wasn't a very big number in the first place, halving it is of no interest... especially if the thing's going to give me some side-effects... if it did, it would be completely pointless... [Y]ou cannot know... whether you should do something... [Y]ou cannot trade off the benefits... [and] the harms from a medical treatment without knowing the absolute risk. You cannot do it in any rational way whatsoever. ...A lot of the communication now is using absolute risk, which is a huge improvement.
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