A Confession

I admit it, I like playing with numbers; call it a hobby and that's fine. They're certainly useful for a lot but are they actually always the important quantity in real life?
When it's windy do we want to know the wind speed in km/h or would I be better off with some kind of descriptive definition, such as the phrase I learnt from my high school french teacher- "The wind is strong enough to de-horn a bull". Same with temperature- I'd rather be told it's t-shirt weather rather than it's 20 degrees C, it's easier to work with.
Even worse is when we're told about things in numbers where the actual number has zero (pun intended) relevance. I don't care if the kitchen table surface has 20 thousand or 20 million bacteria a square cm, I've no idea what the average is and even less idea about how this could effect my health when preparing food, just tell me the risk.

The Real Offenders

Why is this all so bad? because numbers, which I like are used to mislead people and that sucks. This happens all the time in advertising where some scientific numbers are quoted, which I find annoying, as using numbers like this isn't science, it's propaganda. Having said all that I do know that even noble scientists do it the same as well, quoting contextless figures claiming this proves some claim or another, so it appears no one can be excused from this cult of numbers. Including myself I suppose.

A Solution

So the question is how do you know if numbers are appropriate, I have some ideas for questions you can ask yourself and my thoughts on the answers in some examples below.

What is it you want to know?

How many people are coming to the party? 20. That's a question of counting, so use numbers.

How loud should the music at the party be played? Loudish. Not a number. Then again you can always go the Spinal Tap route and crank it up to 11.

Does the number mean what its meant to?

My favourite example from a TV advert is a shampoo claiming that 9 out of 10 users would recommend the product to a friend. Sounds good? Well lets look at the flip side of that- it means 1 in 10 people USING this product- i.e. people who have gone out and specifically bought it- don't think its good enough for other people. All this tells us is that 10% of users seem to have martyr complexes, and say things like "oh no, its not fit for people, but I really don't deserve better so I keep buying it". Anything less than 100% of users recommending seems to be a sign of something a little strange.

Does the number need context to mean anything?

This, to a traininded theoretical physicist, is roughly translated to `are the quantities dimensionless?' or 'is there a predefined reference scale?'.

This is my point about the bacteria from earlier. The absolute number of bacteria somewhere is only a useful figure if you're used to them these numbers, otherwise you'd be better off with things like, twice the safe amount, or better yet "the quantity of bacteria present increases the risk of infection to Y%", should such data exist. Of course Y here is a number. Then again if Y is very small we'd be better off matching the risk to something more familiar, like getting in a car crash or winning the lottery, as this gives us a more tangible feeling for what this result means.

Well if you follow this hopefully you'll use numbers only when appropriate, and only in a meaningful way. Just like everyone on the Steemit does with words....

This is modified from my old blog post that can be found here .