YouSaid · the spoken record

Sir David Spiegelhalter

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-09-03
most recent: 2025-09-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, thanks so much. This was somewhat outside my comfort zone a lot of this. Anyway, so I suppose I had to take the risks of being there's the biggest risk I've done for quite a long time is being on this podcast. I tell you that.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of adventures and taking some risks and being in situations where you're not quite sure what's going on, that you develop resilience. So I just say to young people, go out there and have adventures, but don't be stupid.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benefit from anything that can happen, whether it's good or bad. And for some reason, I think I developed quite a lot of it. I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's a nice secure upbringing I had and the good fortune I've had. But for some reason, I think I got it. I don't know. And I think, though, again, I would say this for young people, that you have to go out and take risks. Don't be reckless. I say this, I do. I say I give talks in schools. I say you've got to take risks. Now, don't be reckless. Cover yourself from the major downsides. Just be careful. But take risks. So go out, you know, camping on your own in the middle of a moor, but don't be stupid. Let people know where you're going and make sure you've got the proper kit in Norway because everyone knows about that stuff, but not in the UK necessarily. So go and have those adventures, but don't be stupid. And so, and it's through having those sort of...”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the number one priority because that's how we deal with the deep uncertainty in all situations. The fact that we don't even know, we can't even list what might happen, particularly somewhere in the future. So what we have to do is cultivate resilience, which is an ability to deal with, if not, and learn from.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I do, I mean, some of them even read my books, which is. I had a seventeen year old come, I nearly burst into tears because he came up and said I really like your book and I said, well, it's not actually aimed for you. I really are so moved that he liked it because I actually think there is some stuff in there about, you know, we have to face up to uncertainty. We don't know what's going to happen. I didn't know when I was 18, so I had no idea what was going to happen in my life. As I said, I had enormous constitutive luck where I was at that time. Lots of opportunities, a very secure situation, everything paid healthcare, university, everything all paid for. I was in a very privileged situation. And so, but there's still, of course, massive unpredictability. But I didn't mind. I felt that I'd got a good upbringing, which gave me resilience. So the crucial thing, and of course this is relevant to corporations as it is to human beings, I think is resilience.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been asking myself that why am I so interested? I think it's growing up in this generation, you know, born in 1953 in the UK, the war was around us all the time, in the films, in the culture, in the experience of the adults around us, things like that. We grew up with it as small kids, absolutely obsessed with it. And I never really have quite lost my interest. I think partly because every time I read anything about it, I just sort of thank heavens for my Well, what's known as constitutional luck the fact that I was born when I was born into a society I was born into, which was staggering constitutive luck”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you don't necessarily change the way they react by just spending money on things. So I think that particularly in pandemics, the role of human reaction to the situation, which is the most important and the least predictable aspect. And actually it's quite difficult to research. It's very difficult, I think, to learn from the past pandemic about exactly what worked and what didn't because things were so different across every bit of society within and between societies. So I'm not quite convinced that just throwing money at something is going to necessarily You know, protect us against”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, well, the Swedes, as they said, the guy, the minister said, well, we practice social distancing anyway in Sweden. So I thought that's great. So, yeah, I think we would be. I think we would be more Swedes in the future. But the crucial thing about that is what it says is that you said you can spend a billion dollars, but you can't change, what are you going to do about people? How people react is absolutely crucial.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the next pandemic will be different. And people certainly wouldn't respond. I don't think in the next pandemic people would accept lockdowns. I just don't think they'd be politically acceptable. So I think.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I suppose my question I'm interested in is whether that kind of interest and attention and wanting trustworthy information can be retained in societies that are becoming increasingly popular, follow populist politicians who object to authority, who are distrustful of what they call elites and experts and so on. And as that happens, well, first of all, I suppose the big thing is can that be countered by having trustworthy Experts People who do know something.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, interesting question. I suppose broadly it comes down a bit to what we're discussing before about whether COVID was actually quite encouraging because in a crisis situation, good communication did rise to the surface. There were obviously people on each side arguing I was right in the middle getting attacked by everybody. So I thought, yeah, doing the right thing. And it wasn't just me, but there was an enhanced respect for the mainstream media. And largely people were interested and there was a whole body. Everybody was discussing the data. It was very active community. And I think it was, as we discuss, exciting a positive time. Now, once a crisis has gone, everyone goes back to their normal stuff and loses interest in all of this.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd quite like to understand consciousness and whether there is such a thing as free will. But that's again going somewhat outside my professional expertise, shall we say. But it is in my book. I do discuss it because I think it comes quite important when you start talking about whether to what extent is the world genuinely stochastic and random or whether to what extent is it actually deterministic but staggeringly complex in a way that renders it unpredictable, I think is an interesting issue.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's, I think, quite setting quite a good because in the UK, we've got an office for statistics regulation, which I think might be fairly unique around the world, an actual body that is there as an inspector, as a regulator for statistics. And I'm a huge believer in that, obviously. And I would love to see that model developed elsewhere, that you have got a body who can really tell people off when statistics are being misused. My God, they'd have their work cut out in the US at the moment, wouldn't they?”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, people are concerned about it. They're obviously concerned about the quality of what's published in the scientific literature, which is a massive problem because there's so much junk out there from paper mills and so on. I think I can talk about it in the UK with actually this is now got a very high level. There's a code of practice of statistics in the UK, which is a pretty dull document, but it's incredibly important. There's a new version coming out, which is really putting down the way in which all official statistics and even non-official statistics should be communicated to the public. And based on these ideas of preempting misunderstandings, of not being misleading, of being open about limitations and so on. And that's all down there. And people have to, government departments have to adhere to it. They are actually bound by it. And so...”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't know. I've moved around rather a lot. Yeah. Oh, one thing. Oh, I think it's the stuff I've been doing later. I think it's on trustworthy communication of evidence. In a way, it's not my. I've done quite a lot of technical stuff. That's where I get all my citations from, etc. And I get loads of those, which is lovely. But in the end, what I'm just obsessed by is the need for trustworthy communication about evidence. As we said, not that it tells you what to do, but unless, I mean, we're sort of doomed if we don't use evidence in an appropriate way and don't communicate it properly. We are just left up to thinking fast in Danny Kahneman's term. We're just left up to gut reactions and emotional feelings in order for everything, I don't think.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't just say, where should I go on holiday? I think it's incredibly valuable when it's unbelievable what it can do. But the guardrails scores are already in there in many ways in terms of violent speech and racism and all sorts of stuff that it can't do that are built in. And the crucial thing I feel is that these should, of course, should be open and public and they should be a regulator to make sure they're being adhered to. But lots of people are saying this. I mean, there's a massive AI safety is such a massive thing because all the tech people are going on about it as well. So I'll leave them to it and hope that there's some decent people involved in it. But it is a crucial area, not my job.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What kind of things do you use to writing my book? I use it for researching and I use it for coding and I use it for personal things like trying to work out where I'm going to go on holiday. So I'll use it all for all sorts of stuff.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, again, I don't know enough about these sort of existential risks and how those could occur, the superintelligence and things like that. I really don't know enough about it and I wouldn't want to claim to. And”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit like COVID. Before COVID, the modellers in the UK said, oh, there could be half a million deaths. And that still gets quoted. Oh, they said there were going to be half a million deaths. No, they said there would be half a million deaths if nobody did anything about it. If we all just sat there and let it wash over us, there would be half a million deaths. And there would have been. But they're now being accused of saying, oh, they said there would be half a million deaths and there weren't. So the point is that One could talk about there being risk, but I think it's limited the value of that if we're all going to assume we're just going to sit here and allow ourselves to be taken over by killer robots. So I think that what it does do is, of course, call for far greater scrutiny of what's being done in openness about the guardrails put in.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how strong it is. And it depends what you mean about extreme risk. It's certainly going to take some jobs and certainly we're all going to have to adapt our jobs, our work to it. It's also incredibly useful and valuable. I of course use it every day. But in terms of sort of risks, well, people, when they talk about this, they're talking about sort of existential risks, about the self-aware AI that's going to start having essentially a will of its own and deciding that these people get it right, get in the way of what it wants to optimize. I think, of course, that is a possible scenario. And I think it's quite reasonable then that people respond by wanting additional overview and guardrails on AI. So it's like a lot of these things people say.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And officially, once that gets above 50% by the balance of probabilities on a civil court case, you could say that man-made climate change was responsible. Now, trying to then attribute it to particular companies, I think, is rather more difficult. But it's brought from a technical point of view, it's brought this fascinating idea of attribution. And of course, for that, you have to have climate models and the climate models are used to make projections as to what's going to happen. A lot of uncertainty, and the models take a lot of time of dealing with that. They also have what I think is really good, independent teams coming up with different climate models, which within the pool, and then they make it even more uncertain. They broaden the things out. And we're never going to know what's going to happen. And one should not state too confidently about what's going to happen. But we know bad things are going to happen.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you see how likely these events were under these two different scenarios. And the relative risk can, our meteorological office do have got an attribution center and they just will give you a relative risk. Technically, that can be converted into a probability of causation. Don't say the probability that this hot weather event, that this tornado was caused by man-made climate change was X percent.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, I know. No, it's just happening, and that's it. You could just tell by the events, which are just going to carry on. There'll be ups and downs. But there are going to be more extreme events. I'm interested in attributes, what is brought to the fore is attribution studies, which is not so much about climate risk, but about looking backwards and saying to what extent was this caused by man-made climate change, which is a really big growing area in research. And it's going to be a big growing area financially when people start suing fossil fuel companies for events that happen. And so, but it all requires models. You have to have a model of what we would, you know, how the climate has developed with man-made interventions and how we think it would have developed had we not been throwing all this muck into the air since the 1700s.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's interesting. I don't know. I think Norway finding it, but it was extremely sensible in how it dealt with it once it had found it compared with the UK. Why you've got your job at the moment to some extent. And so I think the Norway dealt with this in an absolutely brilliant way of seeing it as a national resource to be, in a sense, you know, to be nurtured for the whole entire community rather than just in the UK to sell off the rights in order to raise some money at the time and short term.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it could be on a larger scale, but yeah, it depends on the scale. But nuclear war would not be great. And so that's tricky, I think, because in the end we're all going to die within a very finite Catastrophic existential risks. For a start, but I'm hopelessly optimistic. I think actually they tend to be overrated. But that's maybe because my particular personality is far too optimistic.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he had the whole place stuffed full of mathematicians and really competent people, much more competent mathematicians than me for a stark. And so for a start, I couldn't have contributed anyway. And it would have been really inappropriate, I think, for that to happen. And I just wasn't interested. I couldn't care less.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not interested for a long time because I was funded from the charitable arm of Winton Capital Management, a hedge fund, David Harding's supporter. And he was great. He gave us money and let us get on with what we wanted to. And I think, I hope he felt it was a good investment. But I had nothing to do with the hedge fund business. And I just never had any interest in money. I hope it just puts me off. I just got an object.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was quite complex. No, it was fascinating statistically, and actually I would be interested to know whether it's what the current situation is about that. But it was in a sense trying to make the drug testing regime a bit fairer in order so it could adapt to the individual biology of the athletes.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh then I'm not sure what's happened. Then they had the idea of an athletics passport because they wanted to, actually a passport which kept a complete record of their drug testing history. And it was to try to allow to a certain extent for the fact that there is individual variation between how people do respond to drugs. And so when you take a measurement from somebody, they were particularly interested in people getting blood transfusions just before an athletic event. And so you would be wanting to look at someone's red cell level or something like that. Was it remarkably high? Well, people vary anyway. So to know whether it's been pumped up high, you have to know something about their past history. So essentially you have to have a model for, you know, for someone's variability and their natural baseline level for their hemoglobin level.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elections. Oh, well, for a start, because when you go out and ask somebody, all the election things just ask people, what would you vote if you had to vote now? I mean, that's the question. So you're not even asking them what they're going to vote in the election. You're asking them if you had to vote today, what would you vote? And that's a very biased measure of what you're trying to estimate of what that person will vote in three weeks' time, two weeks' time, one week, even three months' time. People change. People are not necessarily honest. And so people may vote. They may not vote at all. So I think that the basic data source is always going to be biased. And so it's not like predicting weather. Weather changes, but in a sense it's not changing because of what people feel. It's not a changing. So I think they're never going to be.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does seem a bit pathetic for a statistician just to say, well, I hope I'm lucky, but I hope I'm lucky.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stage than the people who got the charge. So there's no good data really on what are my survival prospects. It's very difficult. It's a shame and I wish there were better database. I really wish I could just tap in and find out whatever out of 100 people who are most similar to me what happened to them. But for a start, we don't know. We don't know. It's only been given to people like me for a few years. We've got no long term follow up. We don't know. I mean, some people got it earlier. My oncologist said, oh, I've had someone on this for 16 years and said. So that's the problem with something that fairly rapidly changing. When you're asking for a long term prediction, you can't say.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh mine. Oh, yeah. That's the problem. I've got locally advanced prostate cancer. So I've got some minor metastases, oligometastatic it's called. I've got a few of them. And so the drugs now, the new drugs, the new hormone drugs I'm on abaratarone, and they just are so effective. Now I've got my PSA is essentially non-measurable. But the problem is we're trying to get the user data from survival in clinical trials. It's really depressing when I go back on the trials of Aberatarone. They're terrible. You get sort of median survival of 18 months or something like that. What? No, I'm going to live longer than that. I'm sure. Because, you know, in the trials they were trying this on very sick people and things have improved so much. And actually, I'm at an earlier.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I got prostate cancer. And so I really interested in forecasting effect of people with cancer. And we've been involved in algorithms for breast cancer and prostate cancer, building the software to demonstrate those to people. And they're all in terms of probabilities, and roughish, but not bad in terms of 10 years survival and how those will change depending on the different treatments you've got. And I think it's absolutely essential when somebody says, oh, my doctor told me I had six months to live. I think, what? I never believe they said that anymore. Maybe there's some doctors who'd be so stupid as to say that. But I can't believe that. You have to show, we don't know how long anyone's going to live. We can put some broad bracket on it because it's a survival curve.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I bought one a few years ago when the expected return was higher than the ticket price. There had been so many rollovers. It's still almost completely impossible to win. But I thought, I've got to have a go at a gamble where the expected return is higher than the stake.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly. I don't know. It depends how that's very personal about how Corey. It depends what I want to do if I want to have a picnic or not. So I need the probabilities. And so this is, you know, this goes back to the 1950s with Glenn Breyer developing a scoring rule for probabilistic precipitation forecasts. And it's terribly exciting, I think. And the skill of these probabilistic forecasts is growing all the time. And it will continue to grow.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but what I'm interested in is the, I don't care about the meteorology. That's why I quite like the database approach. What I'm interested in is the first main nature paper from DeepMind on this didn't have uncertainties in it. And I think it's really important to have uncertainties. When I, you know, I all the time I look at probabilities of rain and things like that. I use those uncertainties. If I don't have them, I really would feel a bit lost. And so what I'm interested in.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm really pleased that the UK Met Office has got both teams working and collaborating because I think it's going to be complementary in the end. But I'm kind of, because my background in statistics rather than applied maths, I'm kind of secretly on the side of the black box machine learning people because I just love the thought of just putting the data in and out it comes with a prediction without any ability to say why it's saying it's just saying well in the past when this pattern was there, this is what happened. Well, actually, maybe that's as good as you can do. So I think it's a fascinating competition going on at the moment, which I'm watching with glee.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, and make a prediction which has no ability to explain why it's come up with conclusion, particularly a pure black box, and they're doing really well.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weather forecasts are fascinating what's going on because there's a real competition going on. I think fairly friendly competition about the totally different philosophies for weather forecasting because traditionally it's been kind of applied mathematicians and physicists building huge model weather models based on Navier Stokes equations and differential equations and they build massive models of the atmosphere and then make a prediction six week ten days ahead. They don't use any data apart from the initial conditions really. And then they vary the initial conditions and that produces in an ensemble model and they produce a probability what's going to happen. The alternative approach, which people like Dean Mind have taken, is to throw out all our knowledge of physics, the atmosphere, everything that's been learned in the last 300 years and just throw it all out and take a massive amount of data and to do a pattern reckoning.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a block of data, you've got an image, you've got a set of data, and then you produce an outcome. And it's just brilliant at that. Where I'm much more skeptical is about, I think, very unfounded claims that, oh, well, we can just put your medical record into AI and it'll tell you X, Y, and Z and stuff. People have made a jump from these kind of quite tightly constrained problems, which are just brilliant, into much more general problems. And it's hardly surprising they do that when we look at large language models, how effective they are at coming back with what quite often a reasonable response to very generic issues because they've been able to mine vast amounts of stuff on the web. Now, how good that would be about, and of course it can come up with medical lists and medical diagnoses and things like that. Yeah, it's just fine. It can make suggestions and it can be extremely...”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, I mean, AI is, in terms of what you might call rather tightly controlled areas, it has done brilliantly. I mean, the people at Google DeepMind who started on games like chess and Go and things like that and then moved into obviously protein folding and also sort of medical diagnostic from images in terms of breast cancer and eye problems. They worked with the Morphields Hospital. It's tremendously impressive in that way in that they can take a really quite a big area. But these are all tightly constrained problems.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what statistics has worked on for about the last hundred years. And it's not been bad. It's got some pretty good techniques for largely regression methods and so on. And so it's actually done quite well. But you notice that that is different really from a strict machine learning black box approach, which just throws the data in and tries to extract a prediction, a classification, possibly with some uncertainty or a prediction of what's going to happen, where there's no real understanding there of where it came from. People, again, people will have real difficulty for explaining why a piece of AI came up with its conclusion. Again, people are really working on that now, just like they are with uncertainty. But if you have rather slightly more basic statistical methods that you do, which is why I support them, you can then generate a much clearer explanation.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, that's my entire career. You're asking me to explain what being a statistician means. That's the statistician's job. Trying to split the signal from the noise. And of course, you can't ever do it. And what's a signal and what's noise is never absolutely black and white thing at all. But it's by trying to understand, and this is a standard statistical thing that would have been said for the last century, the sources of variation. Just like in pre-war, all the statistics developed in Rothamstead breeding stations for plants. And it was understanding the sources of variation, what led to the variation between the crop yields, what factors led to it. And of course, there is, in a way, unavoidable variation, which tends to be called noise or random error. And then there's, in a sense, predictable variation, which is due to factors that you might be able to control.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, Oh, we're adjusting our course. It's not a U turn, it's adjusting our course. And there was no pushback from the media. There's no accusations. People really accepted it because he actually showed the evidence to the public as he was explaining it to them. And he could understand it. A politician would have been hopeless at it because he wouldn't have understood what's going on. He wouldn't be able to explain it. And so that to me showed that if you can get good scientists actually doing the communication and they're good and they're reliable and trustworthy, this can have an enormous impact on the public and on Well, public trust in authority”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acknowledging the uncertainties and that you change course. So the guy we worked with who was most impressive, I thought, was Jonathan Vantam, the deputy chief medical officer. We worked together when the UK did admit that the AstraZeneca vaccine was causing these very nasty, well, which was absolutely, I think, pretty well first detected in Norway, causing these nasty blood clots, particularly in young people. And we worked on the communication of that, where we showed that the benefits of the vaccine went down massively when you got younger, but the risks went up. And so there comes a point where you just shouldn't give the vaccine stratified by age. And he then said to the public, he explained all this, used our graphics, went through the numbers, treating the audience with respect, admitting the evidence had changed, and then said, we're changing policy. And everyone said, well, fine.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, a lot of it was not being flexible enough, getting tied into. We were told to wash our hands and wipe surfaces and things like that. And within about a month, we knew this was pretty useless scientifically. And yet nobody ever said, oh, actually, this is not the point of point. It's fresh air that's more important than ventilation. Nobody said that for a year. And so I think what we didn't learn was that you need to be agile and flexible and take people with you.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they make it worse, both their attitude. And since we did these trials and actually saw data on thousands of people showing that trust was improved in the most skeptical way, if you gave a balanced, trustworthy message, including uncertainty, it totally changed my mind. It absolutely convinced me about this. I also believe it's correct on an ethical point of view, because it is correct. But it's also purely from a practical point of view, it should be more effective”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the very people you're trying to reach trust you more because you're finally listening to their concerns. You're finally acknowledging that there are issues out there that perhaps vaccines aren't completely safe and effective. So what that means is the common political way of communicating, which is, I think, put into practice by communication departments in government, which hammer through the message bam, bam, bam, are actively decreasing trust in the group they're trying to reach, those who are most skeptical. People who believe them already, there's no point.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they think they have to be absolutely confident about it. Oh, if we're not certain about everything, nobody will believe us. They'll just listen to somebody else. We have to be absolutely certain about everything. And I think they believe it. And our research with psychologists, and not just our work, but other research we've done randomized trials for different ways of messaging, strongly suggests this is a complete myth, that if you actually do, you're in a position of authority, you do actually admit some uncertainty, that there are pros and cons, et cetera, et cetera, that you are trusted more. And what's more important. You're trusted more by the people who were initially skeptical.”
2025-09-03 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Sir David Spiegelhalter: Statistics, Communicating in Crises, and Living with Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source