David Spiegelhalter

"I do math and statistics. Thats what I do, so I come at the whole business of turning numbers into stories. ...How can we turn numbers into stories?"

"The point is... that you can make these comparisons quite easy... is... 8 [micromorts], running a marathon is... 7, ... 5, s going to be 400..."

"This was discovered by Gompertz in 1825. Theres something about our bodies, the way that we age, that means that every year our chance of dying increases by the same amount, 9%."

"This is called a hazard curve. ...This is the chance of dying before your next birthday, on average. ...[I]ts... on a , so 10%... (1 in 10) 83 year olds will not see 84... 1 in 100 people like me [age 59] will not see their next birthday. 1 in 1,000 thirty-two year olds, and 1 in 10,000 7 year olds... and there is a... lump, sadly jumping up at 17, as you can imagine... boys... a risk-taking lump, but if you ignore that lump... its a... straight line between... 7 and 90."

"These s that epidemiologists report, as Michael has so ably shown, tend to get... badly reported in the newspapers. So this... in the ... "Less Meat, More Veg is the Secret for Longer Life" which... probably could well be the case, but the way they report it... They said that if we cut down the amount of red meat... 10% of all deaths would be avoided. ...So 10% of us will live forever eating nuts. This is not true. ...[T]heyre talking about relative risk, but they dont understand."

"So weve been trying to think of another metaphor... and the one we caught hold of is... speed of aging. So its turning these numbers, rather bold numbers quite difficult to understand, into stories, and the story weve got is, "Getting older quicker" or "Aging Slower"..."

"So its a different sort of risk. These are chronic risks. ...[T]hings that... if you carry on with them, are likely to shorten your life. So how can we express these... [T]hese are the ones that newspapers tend to get terribly wrong."

"Life-expectancy reduced by 1 year = about 30 minutes off your life expectancy for each day with the habit = 1"

"[W]e tend to think... of something thats going to happen... soon, or is well understood as risk, but if were talking about what will happen in the world in ten years time. Whos going to start putting chances on this. Youd be... deluded... Theres much... deeper uncertainty or... radical uncertainty..."

"That change in life expectancy is not that gripping in itself. So what weve 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." Its like losing roughly 1/50 of your life. Its 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... its as if its taking 1/2 hour... off your life. ...Youre aging an extra 1/2 hour sitting on your backside watching television ..."

"[W]e can compare hang gliding... taking heroin... health treatments, with standing next to Hiroshima. Were deliberately... using these numbers to tell uncomfortable stories."

"What we use in the book... are ways which we think might... provide gripping narratives, and yet provide a realistic way of communicating small risks..."