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Is anyone willing to defend Professor Spiegelhalter's claim? If not: 1. Why is it on a Royal Statistical Society website? 2. Why is it on a press regulator's website? 3. What has the Society done to rectify wrong impressions among journalists and the public?pic.twitter.com/vlHelqUqE2
The Royal Statistical Society has spread further misinformation: "we have received some criticism for *reporting* the World Bank figures." The criticism was in fact largely of the Society's claims, and discrimination against people in poor countries. https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/4109-debates-prompted-by-our-2018-stats-of-the-year …pic.twitter.com/qQacICYAN3
The Society seems not to have addressed a key problem: the damaging effect of misinformation of this kind on politics, policy choices and voters' perceptions of the success of governments. It should be obvious that this risks lives.
Thanks for bringing to my attention the response of the @RoyalStatSoc to the controversy in which they had quite unnecessarily embroiled themselves, presumably in pursuit of likes and retweets (their response again here https://www.statslife.org.uk/features/4109-debates-prompted-by-our-2018-stats-of-the-year …)...
The response of the @royalstatsoc to what they now acknowledge is a live controversy on the credibility of the global poverty estimates they had previously celebrated, is quite inept for an organisation claiming to be committed to its particular goals: https://www.rss.org.uk/RSS/About/RSS/About_the_RSS/About_top.aspx?hkey=e8216e58-513f-4d7c-be9d-f989d9eed036 … ...
Here are some dimensions of the ineptness. First (and perhaps symptomatic of the contemporary culture of public promotion being given priority over substantive content) a complete evasion of substantive responsibility...
The @royalstatsoc says that its 'Statistics of the Year' were meant to "somehow capture the spirit of the year or told an overlooked story'. We are told that the judging panel picked 'the strongest entries'. But strongest in what sense? Is substantive validity even relevant here?
Apparently not, as we are told further that "Our aim is to engage the public with statistics, and it has largely been a successful exercise in generating public interest". There are many ways to generate public interest (use imagination) not all of which are recommendable...
One can commit harakiri to generate public interest, but then maybe one oughtn't. @royalstatsoc goes on to present this gem of evasion: "We are a relatively decentralised and member-led body, but centrally we are raising awareness of the debate within our own organisation"...
In short, we poor paid functionaries of the organisation are not responsible to know anything (unlike our members) and we thus throw the ball to them. @hetanshah
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