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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“The meantime. But the final one is the most important. You say we will come back to you and our advice will change as we learn more. So you emphasize the provisionality of what you're saying. Now this is both deeply trustworthy because it's true. It's also, as far as I can see, absolutely impossible for politicians to do. It's just not in their vocabulary at all, this idea of provisionality. Why is it?”
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, yeah. This is from communicating evidence in a crisis. This is all derived from John Krebs when he was head of the Food Standards Agency in the UK when he faced crisis after crisis. He had foot and mouth, he had mad cow disease. He had everything, one after the other, total disasters. And he developed a playbook that afterwards he wrote and said, this is what I did when I was talking. Five points. And you've got to have, everyone should have these written tattooed on them, I think. First, what you know. So, you know, be really clear about what we know. And then you say what you don't know. You say where the areas of uncertainty are. You admit them straight away. Second, not first, but what is second? And then you say, you say, what we're doing about it. You know, we are learning more. We're doing experiments. We're finding out we're collecting data. We are learning. We are learning. Then you tell people what they can do in the meantime that you may want to be cautious, you may not want to eat beef, you may not want to do everything. So you give people advice, self-efficacy.”
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
“Exactly, and I keep on even now get people coming up and saying, Well, thank you so much for the work you're doing during COVID. And the media had to learn that it wasn't just me, other statisticians who were out there talking about the numbers. And yet we always, at the beginning, at least, ask, well, you know, who's to blame and what's going to happen or what should be done? And we'd have to say, I'm not going to say, no, no, that's not my job. You'll have to ask somebody else. All we're doing is explaining the numbers. And after a while, the media learned that this is what the audience actually wanted. Wanted an unbiased, unagendered discussion of the numbers and they loved it. And so, you know, I was really popular, to be honest.”
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
“Paradise. Well, I don't know. Paradise isn't quite the right word, but it was very exciting, very challenging, and incredibly rewarding.”
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, everything. Good. We wrote a whole book with every chapter on a different data source. There was so much, I mean, I was working around the clock really analyzing data and communicating about it because I didn't have an official role, which is great, which meant I could get out there with the media and try to explain things. And again, I never said what should be done. It was only trying to explain the numbers. And you had everything had the vaccines. You had the Rollac. You had the testing. You had, of course, the disease, the infections.”
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
“Communication of official statistics boring old official statistics is to try to preempt the misunderstanding. Because once everything's out there, it's really difficult to counter the misinformation that misclaims, which might be made accidentally or deliberately. You can't stop people saying everything you can't stop misclaims. But if you can preempt them, if you can understand by knowing your audiences, by listening to people's concerns, even the people you don't like, to know what might be said, you can get in there and actually say this data means, you know, I think we can interpret it to mean at least this, but it does not mean this. And that, I think, is going to be becoming a more common trend in the communication of official statistics to say what things don't mean.”
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 think obviously there's enormous blame on social media on the algorithms, on the recommendation algorithms that mean that something, oh, wow, that looks impressive. And it's almost certainly wrong. And so often they are based on numbers. You know, people love numbers and they kind of think, as we said before, they kind of think they're cold hard facts. But no. And often the numbers are actually not completely wrong. It's just that they're grossly misinterpreted and exaggerated and one-sided cherry-picked. And a wrongly wrong number that's blown up and people making some brold claim is around the world is just triggered by the algorithms everywhere. And it looks good. It looks impressive. And trying to backtrack on that is really, really difficult. And that's why one of the things I'm on the board for the UK statistics authority and one of the things I try to hammer all the time.”
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 want to tell anyone what to do. I don't want to tell anyone what the right policy is. All I want to do is say, please respect the evidence that we've got. Just respect it. And it doesn't tell you what to do or whatever, but just try to respect it. And it's not just because politicians, it's social media, it's conspiracy theories everywhere. The lack of concern or I think deliberate lack of understanding of what good evidence is and how it should be used is deeply upsetting to a nerd.”
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 think what RFK is saying about vaccines at the moment, because he's got a built-in bars. I mean, vaccines are not perfect. They're not perfectly safe and they're not perfectly effective. So I'd be the first one to say the term vaccines are safe and effective is actually misleading. However, they are of enormous value. And he's got his particular, I think, biases there. And of course, I'm not going to talk about Trump and the way he was setting charists and things like that. So, you know, it seemed to be how he originally did that seemed to be based on what a 20-year-old intern might do in a spreadsheet. And so it just upsets me when I see the enormous, oh, apart from, of course, sacking the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics when he doesn't like the numbers. So all these things are deeply upsetting to a nerdy statistician who...”
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
“To see what happens when high level public discourse is not based on evidence, it's not based on numbers, it's just based on people saying what they feel like saying, and regardless of the evidence behind it.”
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 are the big wrong decisions people are making? So we only have to look at some of the without mentioning any names. Well, do a few. Okay. We only have to look at what's happening in America at the moment.”
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
“Data properly across. It's got better, but it's still slow. I'm on a group in the NHS that's only now building a really rigorous statistical monitoring system for adverse events in maternity units. And it's been endless maternity scandals in the UK. And finally, we've got a system based on, it's essentially a statistical process control system, but that we applied to shipment and then people took what we'd done, which was adapting industrial quality control to medical outcomes and then applied it to, for example, intensive children's intensive care in the UK has got a monitoring system based almost precisely on the work we did for shipment for early detection of 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
“The mind boggling ones. Yeah, I suppose it's the ones I've been involved in actually four major public inquiries into health scandals in the UK. That's kind of where I develop quite a slightly higher public profile, I think. So ones where over 30 babies died with heart surgery at a center more than you would expect to have died. And then, of course, the second one was Harold Shipman, the mass murderer, who murdered at least 250 and possibly 400 of his patients over 20-year period. And we were brought in, he had been caught by then, but we were brought in to say, could he have been detected earlier or not? Yes, yeah, and we can clearly he could have been detected after a few years if somebody had been looking at the data because he had so many excess deaths, but nobody was looking at the data.”
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
“The machine learning techniques that people use now have have developed beyond all imagination and they really are incredible however they are really struggling with uncertainty 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, oh, very naturally, just because there's a good job going. And curiously, the job I first real job after university, I taught in America for a year and then came back. And it was 1978. And it was working on artificial intelligence in medicine, late 1970s. It was a booming idea. It was then largely called computer-aided diagnosis and computer-aided prognosis. And it was building statistical models to enable diagnosis, but it included computer interviewing of people with stomach complaints and things like that. It was really advanced. And the tech was terrible, but the ideas were absolutely modern. And the problems, the issues about how to integrate this in with medical practice were in there. So I was working on uncertainty in AI for much of the 1980s. And we thought we'd solved it. Ha, how wrong could we be? But because it's still a massive topic, obviously.”
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 think it's one of the numbers. It's a complete myth that they're cold hard facts. Even before they're weaponized, we know that someone has made a decision to collect that particular data. There's lots of judgments that's gone into every analysis, every sort of management. There's always judgment behind every statistical analysis. And it's good if that's made very explicit. And so other judgments can be added to it. People may disagree about the fundamental tenets, the fundamental assumptions that are always underlying any statistical analysis. So it's a mixture. It's not thinking fast. It's not thinking slow. It has to be a combination of the two.”
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
“Whether sending the seals when it was suspected that Osama bin Laden was in the compound in Abotabad. And he had a very diverse team of advisors who didn't speak to each other. And some were, you know, they may have been set up as kind of red teams. They were really pessimistic. 30 to 40 percent chance he was going to be there. Others were real gun-ho, 80 to 90 percent chances there. And he had to put all that information together. But I think that's what had Saunder actually has to take the wrap, the real decision maker, should be open to a diversity of opinion when there is no clear, correct answer. So I think the first thing is we have to acknowledge there's no correct way of doing this. We have to have a diversity of opinion. And we have to work in a combination of an analytic approach, which I'm, you know, based in maths. I've done maths and stats. I love trying to deconstruct uncertainty, looking at the sources, analyzing data.”
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
“Don't exist, I think. So I really don't like thinking in those. This is some objective. No, I think one can try to be, in a sense, reasonable in a much broader sense of, you know, I suppose how I would say is think is, first of all, you have to use as much imagination as you can. Things might happen that you didn't think of, but really you're really opening yourself up to problems if you haven't at least made a big effort to envisage the possible futures, to consider quite extreme scenarios, and that requires diversity of inputs. I'm hopeless at this. I have no imagination at all. Absolutely disastrous. But I know that if I were, God forbid, in an important decisions for society, I'd want advisors with a real range of different inputs. The example I like is Barack Obama when he was faced with the decision about”
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, first of all, I don't like the word rational. So in my book, I hardly use the word rational at all because I think this claim that's been expressed, oh, yeah, we can look at risks rationally and deconstruct them thing. Actually, in real life, I think that's pretty nonsensical. And I've taught this stuff for decades. I've taught decision theory. I know how you should be doing it. And I know you can't do it in practice because for the theory to work, you have to be able to list all the possibilities. You have to list all the options. You have to look at the probabilities of the possible outcomes and their value to you. And then according to economic principles, you should maximize your expected return and things like that. Well, it just doesn't work. It fails at the first step that you can't even list everything that's going to happen, let alone except in really simple situations, put numbers on everything. So I think nobody can be rational.”
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
“Exactly, exactly, and that's been known for ages that unknown risk, Ellsberg paradoxes that people looking in the 1950s, that if you couldn't actually say how big the risk was, people were much more averse to being exposed to it. And that's been known for ages, a well-known idea of risk aversion, to a well-known about the risk has been 70 years ago, I think Daniel Ellsberg did his original study of that. And I think quite reasonably because if you don't know what the possibilities are and roughly how likely they are, then all sorts of other perhaps rather deeper attitudes to caution and precaution come in and people might start being really hedging themselves against, and quite reasonably against major losses. And we can see that going on in all parts of our lives.”
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 haven't actually looked at that. I mean, people will have looked at that because people have studied risk and proneness and risk aversion. What they found is that there's not a single characteristic. I think this is why it's not part of the big five, a single risk characteristic in people's personalities. Some people, I've known people who are incredibly sort of, what I would think, consider reckless physically with what they did with their bodies. They were extremely cautious with money. Other people may be very bold socially and take all sorts of risks in changing jobs, in changing friends, and going into new environments. But again, maybe very cautious about their physical health. And so there is not a single risk scale where you can put everybody on. It's much more multidimensional than 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
“Oh, there are some people, I think, who are very cautious, who would like to have everything planned out, who want to feel that they can control all contingencies and have mapped out the possibilities. And, of course, this is impossible. And this is when I talk to audiences, when I say, the first thing is not only that we have to face uncertainty, but we have to face actually deeper uncertainty that we can't even list the possibilities of what might happen to us in the future. We have to deal with that cloud of unknowing. And that's the part of human life. And I'm interested in strategies that people use personally to deal with 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
“Well, some people like it, some people are a bit more bold than others. But the point is that when you actually then go a bit further and say, well, do you want to know what you're going to get for Christmas? Do you want to know how a match is going to end? If you've recorded it or something, do you want to know, you know, do you just jump to the end of your series on TV to see the last episode and see what happens? Or also the thing I ask is, do you want to know when you're going to die, if I could tell you? And no, they all say no. Or some would quite, some would like to know when they're going to die. Some are so, in a way, uncertainty averse that they really like to have everything planned. But most people have realized that you've got to live with uncertainty and think of a life without uncertainty, without some risk.”
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, first of all, that I'm not a psychologist. So I am a statistician, but I have done my best to learn from psychologists that I have worked with. And I suppose just from observing how people react to risk and uncertainty, I tend to think of the broader idea of uncertainty rather than just risk, everything to do with not knowing about what might happen in the future or even not knowing what's going on at the moment or what's happened in the past. All these things we are uncertain about. Some of them, you know, usually things do have an upside and a downside, and so they could be considered risks depending on how they occur. But I think, you know, what I've learned is that people have to live with uncertainty. When you ask people, they say, oh, I don't like uncertainty. And then when you ask.”
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