It’s a common human tendency to attribute a causal effect between diff — 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..."

"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."

"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."

"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..."