Statistics are interesting because they are often used to sway arguments, or entice people. This discussion looks at the impact of normal statistics without an underlying context. Take the example of a cookware company that uses statistics in its advertisements (very few other companies provide statistics of any sort). Some of the statistics are shown below.
- 103 Michelin-recognized restaurants use the cookware.
- The cookware is used in over 2,000 global restaurants.
- 90,000 pans in service.
These numbers may seem significant, but put in context, they are not. For example in the first statement, “100 Michelin-recognized restaurants use the cookware”. Worldwide there are approximately 18,713 Michelin-recognized (not starred) restaurants. So 103/18713 = 0.55%. One would argue that this really isn’t a significant number. If we were to look at only Michelin-starred restaurants, some 3700 worldwide, the number would increase to 103/3700 = 2.78%. The number looks a lot better if we only consider North America, where the number is 1941, so 103/1941 = 5.3% which is 10 times as significant, but still not that much.
For the second statistic, that it is “used by over 2,000 global restaurants”, let’s look at a number of scenarios. This is hard to quantify, because how do you define a “global restaurant”. It has to be different from a run-of-the-mill restaurant, because there could be 15-25 million of those. A better way to look at is to consider the number of professional chefs who run restaurants. Let’s consider just Canada first, where there are 62,200 chefs (2023). This would give us 2000/62200 = 3.2%. If we look at the USA, this number climbs to 286,000, and 0.7%. Neither is earth-shattering, and if we include worldwide restaurants the number just plummets.
The last statistic, 90,000 pans, is quite meaningless. It’s just a reflect of how many pans have been sold, and can’t really be compared to other companies because they don’t publish their data. Some vague figures suggest the Le Creuset foundry in France produces 25,000 items a day. Restaurants use either stainless steel or aluminum pans, and to put the number into context, there are circa 97,000 restaurants in Canada alone (of course the 90,000 pans were not suggested to come from restaurants exclusively).
There is nothing to say that the numbers used in the advertisements are whatsoever incorrect, but they do provide a level of ambiguity because they aren’t given in any frame of reference. Numbers only mean something if put into context.
The Craft of Coding 