I love that Tumblr is like “We got Neil Gaiman to do a question and answer session so send in your questions and maybe he’ll answer them!” as though the man hasn’t spent the last few years hanging out here answering random questions and cementing himself as a widely beloved fixture of this site
“We brought in Neil Gaiman”
the fuck you did, he lives here
“we brought in neil gaiman”
you pulled him unceremoniously from his bed to go sit on the couch is what you did
Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics.
“Increases your chances by 80%” does not mean “there is now an 80% chance”.
If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%.
if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%.
thats how that works.
Wow I don’t understand math at all
‘if you have a baby after 35, the chance of deformities goes up by 100%’ is a line I hear alot.
It goes up from .5% to 1%
I think my brain just stopped working
100% is just another way of saying twice more likely. So 100% more basically means multiply the number you do have by 2.
Imagine how many woman are scared to have kids because of that statistic
This is why I took stats instead of calc. Because I don’t build engineer bridges in my everyday life but I sure do read studies that affect how I might live my life if I misinterpret them.
I’m terrible at numbers and math but I knew this and I really take it for granted. The average person definitely assumes, quite understandably, that “600% INCREASE!!!” must always mean a whole lot even if it literally only means that one of something is now six of something.
Politicians probably take a shitload of advantage of this confusion.
just remember that increased BY and increased TO are very different things.
Oh god I didn’t even think about that whole other layer of confusion.
Yeah if you’ve got 100 people and one of them is sick, that’s 1% of them who are sick, so if it “increased BY 100%” then that means now two people are sick.
If it’s “increased TO 100%” then all 100 people are sick.
