The Power of Statistics

Gabriellebirchak/ July 16, 2020/ Modern History

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS

One of the many joys about Face­book is that as the elec­tion looms on the hori­zon, you get to have heat­ed debates with indi­vid­u­als on Face­book about things such as the impor­tance of wear­ing a mask dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. One par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual stat­ed that for every doc­tor that tells us to wear a mask, there is anoth­er doc­tor that says the mask is not nec­es­sary. Sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, this is not the case. That would mean that the coun­try­wide debate would show that 50% of doc­tors would dis­pute the use of masks.

In my research, I only found two doc­tors who do not advo­cate using a mask. How­ev­er, the Amer­i­can Hos­pi­tal Asso­ci­a­tion, the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, and the Amer­i­can Nurs­es Asso­ci­a­tion have writ­ten a let­ter urg­ing Amer­i­cans to wear a mask. So, if we were to con­sid­er that of the 950,000 prac­tic­ing physi­cians in the Unit­ed States that two of those doc­tors do not advo­cate for masks, then the sta­tis­tics would be that .0002% of America’s doc­tors do not advo­cate for masks. That is excep­tion­al­ly dif­fer­ent from 50%.

And this leads me to today’s top­ic: Sta­tis­tics. Every­body should learn sta­tis­tics because sta­tis­tics are awe­some. Stats can help any­body get out of an argu­ment if the data is correct.

Sta­tis­tics is the method of col­lect­ing data and ana­lyz­ing it to infer pro­por­tions in whole from sam­ple rep­re­sen­ta­tions. For exam­ple, in a poll of how many peo­ple in the Unit­ed States enjoy apples or bananas, a sam­ple of polls would be tak­en across the coun­try that would accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent the entire pop­u­la­tion. So, if we were to poll ten peo­ple in ten dif­fer­ent cities across the coun­try, and gath­er the data as to who prefers apples over bananas, we could then come up with a sta­tis­tic that rep­re­sents the coun­try as a whole, because the sam­ple size rep­re­sents the opin­ions of every­body across the coun­try. For the record, 75% of con­sumers pur­chase bananas, while 73% of con­sumers pur­chase apples.[i]

History of statistics

The process of gath­er­ing data has been around since Homo sapi­ens and Nean­derthals have been able to count. Thir­ty thou­sand years ago, some­one decid­ed to count up to 55 by putting deep notch­es in a bone. This is the infa­mous “wolf bone” that was found in 1937 in Czecho­slo­va­kia by arche­ol­o­gists. These notch­es were arranged in groups of five, with one group of 25 notch­es and anoth­er group of 30 notch­es. Hence, this bone is one of our ear­li­est instances of statistics.

We also have evi­dence from arche­o­log­i­cal sites in Turkey of flat, two-sided throw sticks that were used as dice that date back as far as 3000 BCE.[ii] These sticks were used for a game called Senet, which is still being played today. Thus, we are look­ing at humans play­ing with num­bers and under­stand­ing how they describe prob­a­bil­i­ties and statistics. 

In 2000 BCE, Yu the Great imple­ment­ed a cen­sus to eval­u­ate China’s pop­u­la­tion. They cal­cu­lat­ed a total of 13,553,923 cit­i­zens of China.

Thus, as long as we’ve been count­ing, we have been gath­er­ing data and using sta­tis­tics. Sta­tis­tics was most overt­ly evi­dent in our his­to­ries from the 4,000-year-old Plimp­ton 322 tablet, which shows nota­tion that helped Baby­lon con­clude how much food they need­ed for each Babylonian. 

By 300 BCE, the Roman Empire was gath­er­ing data every five years on its cit­i­zens. As a result, every man and his fam­i­ly were required to return to their place of birth to be count­ed so that they could keep track of their pop­u­la­tion. Not only was it use­ful in deter­min­ing how many peo­ple were inhab­i­tants of Rome, but it also was use­ful in deter­min­ing who was pay­ing taxes.

This process con­tin­ued well into our cur­rent age. In 1086, William the Con­queror ordered the pro­duc­tion of the Domes­day book. It was an inven­to­ry of land and prop­er­ty that cov­ered all of Eng­land. Odd­ly, Win­ches­ter and Lon­don didn’t make it into the book. Nev­er­the­less, its pur­pose was much like the Romans; they want­ed to be able to tax the own­ers on the land. By 1279, King Edward the first also com­mis­sioned an inquiry into land­hold­ing in Eng­land for tax purposes.

Fast for­ward to the 17th cen­tu­ry. In 1603, three pri­ma­ry indi­vid­u­als helped to estab­lish how we work with sta­tis­tics today. These three were Blaise Pas­cal, Chris­ti­aan Huy­gens, and John Graunt. These three gen­tle­men con­tributed a great deal to the sta­tis­tics that we under­stand today. Pas­cal and Huy­gens were both aca­d­e­mics. Pas­cal was an inven­tor, math­e­mati­cian, physi­cist, and Catholic the­olo­gian. He was one of the first inven­tors of the mechan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tor, which car­ried out the addi­tion and sub­trac­tion of two num­bers, and per­formed mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion by repeat­ing the process of addi­tion or subtraction.

Pas­cal often cor­re­spond­ed with Pierre de Fer­mat, and the two of them worked con­sid­er­ably on prob­a­bil­i­ty prob­lems, specif­i­cal­ly the rolling of a dice. The two pri­ma­ry prob­a­bil­i­ty ques­tions that they worked on were how many times some­body could throw a pair of dice before one can get dou­ble six­es. The oth­er ques­tion that they focused on was how to divide the stakes if the game of prob­a­bil­i­ty was stopped before it was complete.

Huy­gens was a Dutch physi­cist, math­e­mati­cian, astronomer, and inven­tor. Huy­gens pub­lished a book on prob­a­bil­i­ty called The Val­ue of all Chances in Games of For­tune. In this par­tic­u­lar trea­tise, he ref­er­enced sev­er­al of Fermat’s prob­lems. This work was so sig­nif­i­cant that it estab­lished a stan­dard that sta­tis­ti­cians used for about 50 years.

Enter John Graunt

One of my favorite sto­ries about sta­tis­ti­cians comes from the 17th cen­tu­ry and a sto­ry about a hab­er­dash­er. A hab­er­dash­er in the UK is some­body who sells items to make men’s cloth­ing, such as nee­dles, rib­bons, but­tons, cloth, and zippers.

Graunt was born in 1620. His father was a drap­er, and by the time he was old enough, he began to work for his father’s shop, even­tu­al­ly tak­ing over as a hab­er­dash­er. What is most unas­sum­ing about Graunt is that in his life, he did more than sell retail prod­ucts. He was a self-taught math­e­mati­cian who became an expert in pop­u­la­tion statistics.

In Feb­ru­ary of 1661, he and Sir William Pet­ty pub­lished a paper titled Nat­ur­al and Polit­i­cal Obser­va­tions Men­tioned in the Fol­low­ing Index and Made Upon the Bills of Mor­tal­i­ty. It is a long title, but the con­cept behind it was that fac­tu­al data was used to cre­ate sta­tis­ti­cal infer­ences. Graunt was the first per­son to do this kind of work. In his work, he deter­mined the liv­ing and mor­tal­i­ty rate in Lon­don. What is sig­nif­i­cant about this par­tic­u­lar paper is that he pro­vid­ed prob­a­bil­i­ties of sur­vival for each age group, and even though it was a prob­a­bil­i­ty of sur­vival, this par­tic­u­lar bill of mor­tal­i­ty did not include the ages of death. This book was foun­da­tion­al to the begin­ning of pub­lic health sta­tis­tics and allowed med­ical experts, as well as the gov­ern­ment, to under­stand the con­clu­sions about the mor­tal­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als as it relat­ed to dis­eases. This paper put him on the map of the world of math­e­mat­ics. It made Graunt one of the first experts in epi­demi­ol­o­gy. In 1662, the Roy­al Soci­ety elect­ed him as a fellow.

What led to his work on this was his skep­ti­cism about the num­ber of deaths that con­tributed to “liv­er-grown” and “spleen” dis­eases. Dur­ing this time, many deaths were brought on by rick­ets, which is a skele­tal dis­or­der brought on by lack of cal­ci­um, phos­phate, and vit­a­min D. Rick­ets even­tu­al­ly leads to soft­en­ing of the bones and skele­tal abnor­mal­i­ties in chil­dren. What Graunt dis­cov­ered was that these oth­er deaths brought on by liv­er dis­ease and spleen were brought on by rick­ets. As a result, through his data and “life table,” he deter­mined that death brought on by rick­ets was in a max­i­mum high in the year 1634.

His paper allud­ed to his char­ac­ter. He was a very hum­ble man. In the paper, he wrote,

How far I have suc­ceed­ed in the Pre­miss­es, I now offer to the World’s cen­sure, Who, I hope, will not expect from me, not pro­fess­ing Let­ters, things demon­strat­ed with the same cer­tain­ty, where­with Learned men deter­mine in their Scholes; but will take it well, that I should offer at a new thing, and could for­bear pre­sum­ing to med­dle where any of the Learned Pens have ever touched before, and that I have tak­en the pains, and been at the charge, of set­ting out those Tables, where­by all men may both cor­rect my Posi­tions, and raise oth­ers of their own: For here­in I have, like a sil­ly Schole-boy, com­ing to say my Les­son to the World (that Peev­ish, and Tetchie Mas­ter) brought a bun­dle of Rods where­with to be whipt, for every mis­take I have com­mit­ted.[iii]

In oth­er words, he’s stat­ing that he is not offer­ing a new dis­cov­ery; it is just that he found some­thing dif­fer­ent that had not been seen before. He hum­bled him­self before the intel­li­gence of his con­tem­po­raries. This move actu­al­ly served to pique the curios­i­ty of his aca­d­e­m­ic peers and led them to respect him even more.

Sad­ly, on Sep­tem­ber 2, 1666, in the King’s Bak­ery in Pud­ding Lane right near Lon­don Bridge, a fire broke out. This fire spread so fast and so exten­sive­ly that it last­ed for four days, swept through cen­tral Lon­don, and destroyed over 13,000 homes, 87 parish­es, St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, and gov­ern­ment build­ings. The fire destroyed Graunt’s home and the New Riv­er Com­pa­ny, which was a cloth­ing busi­ness where he worked as a man­ag­er. The fire led to finan­cial trou­bles for him. Ulti­mate­ly, he had to file for bank­rupt­cy. Less than ten years lat­er, Graunt died from jaun­dice and liv­er dis­ease. The city deeply missed him. His work as a self-made epi­demi­ol­o­gist and sta­tis­ti­cian pro­vid­ed a plat­form for med­ical health experts and the gov­ern­ment to under­stand mor­tal­i­ty rates and the rise and spread of diseases.

Sta­tis­tics are phe­nom­e­nal. What I love most about stats is that they serve as the per­fect tool for argu­men­ta­tion and live­ly din­ner conversation.

Dinnertime Stats

Though I don’t have sta­tis­tics on when the pan­dem­ic will end, I do have some inter­est­ing sta­tis­tics for when you’re sit­ting at the table with your fam­i­ly, look­ing at them for the mil­lionth time in the last six months, and won­der­ing what to talk about oth­er than our cur­rent pol­i­tics. For those of you look­ing for ideas, I offer the fol­low­ing statistics:

Sta­tis­tics show that your odds of win­ning the lot­tery are one in almost 14 million.

One out of three adults sleeps with a ted­dy bear or oth­er type of woo­bie. As for me, I sleep with my Chi­huahua. I know she’s not inan­i­mate, but she’s so old she might as well be.

Amer­i­cans read for plea­sure less than 10 min­utes a day.

More than 36 mil­lion Amer­i­cans can’t read above a third-grade level.

Forty-five per­cent of Amer­i­cans think that ghosts are real.

Of col­lege foot­ball play­ers, only 1.5% go on to play in the major pro­fes­sion­al leagues.

Thir­ty-one per­cent of Amer­i­cans don’t know their neighbors.

And accord­ing to State Farm actu­ar­ies, Amer­i­cans have a one in 175 chance of being audit­ed by the IRS, a one in 215 chance of dat­ing a mil­lion­aire, and a one in 220 chance of writ­ing a New York Times best­seller.[iv]

But most impor­tant­ly, accord­ing to the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, wear­ing a mask reduces the spread of coro­n­avirus by 82%. Addi­tion­al­ly, keep­ing a dis­tance of six feet can be even more effective.

As of May 2020, 42% of coro­n­avirus deaths have tak­en place in nurs­ing homes and assist­ed liv­ing facil­i­ties. Two mil­lion Amer­i­cans live in those nurs­ing home facil­i­ties. Addi­tion­al­ly, more than sev­en per­cent of America’s pop­u­la­tion strug­gle with autoim­mune dis­or­ders, and five per­cent of Amer­i­cans are can­cer sur­vivors. So the next time you leave the house, think about where you are going. Activ­i­ties such as fly­ing and going to bars are at high risk. Also, if you are leav­ing home with­out a mask, stop for just a sec­ond and think about some­body else. Think about somebody’s aging par­ent, or a friend with a weak immune sys­tem, or a co-work­er who has recov­ered from can­cer. They are at risk. The mask pro­tects all of those who can suf­fer the worst from this dis­ease. And I hap­pen to know that 99.999% of all Unit­ed States doc­tors would agree with me!

Thanks for read­ing! Until next time, carpe diem! 

Gabrielle

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[i] “What Fresh Fruit Do Amer­i­cans Eat the Most?” Healthy Eat­ing | SF Gate. Accessed July 13, 2020. https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/fresh-fruit-americans-eat-most-9593.html.

[ii] “Nation­al Muse­ums of Scot­land — Two Bone Dice.” Nation­al Muse­ums Scot­land. Accessed July 13, 2020. https://nms.scran.ac.uk/database/record.php?usi=000–100-040–457‑C.

[iii] Suther­land, Ian. “John Graunt: A Ter­cente­nary Trib­ute.” Jour­nal of the Roy­al Sta­tis­ti­cal Soci­ety. Series A (Gen­er­al) 126, no. 4 (1963): 537–56. Accessed July 16, 2020. doi:10.2307/2982578.

[iv] Dal­bey, Beth. “Deer Col­li­sions Across The U.S.: The Odds Of Hit­ting Ani­mals.” Across Amer­i­ca, US Patch. Last mod­i­fied Octo­ber 3, 2019. https://patch.com/us/across-america/deer-collisions-across-u-s-odds-hitting-animals.