Understanding Risk in Media Statistics

If you don't understand this trick, you will be easy to manipulate.

It's been used by the government, by big corporations,

and by the media to control

public thought and behavior. This is how people use numbers that are

technically true to make things sound way scarier or

way safer than they actually are. Here's the trick.

Absolute risk is the real chance of something happening.

Think about a jar with 10,000 marbles in it, and only one of

them is red. Your chance of picking the red marble

is one in 10,000. That's the absolute risk.

Now, relative risk compares two tiny numbers to

make

one of them sound huge. So if there's another jar, and it has two

red marbles, they'll say, "You have 100% more chance

of getting a red marble in this jar than you do in this jar."

Well, your chance went from one in 10,000 to two

in 10,000, both small numbers, but your chance has doubled.

Relative risk is the favorite tool of fearmongers because it makes

a tiny number sound huge. Absolute risk shows the

real-world odds. Now watch how this plays out.

You've seen the headline, "You're 840 times more likely to get

sick from raw milk than from pasteurized milk." That's a relative risk number.

It is technically true, but the absolute risk of getting

sick from raw milk is about one in 13,000 for the people who

drink it. That is less than 1/100 of

1%. They pulled the same move with COVID

vaccines. Do you remember the headlines?

"The Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective." That number

was blasted everywhere, but here's the truth.

That was the relative risk reduction.

When you dig into the actual trial data, the absolute risk

reduction, the real difference between the vaccinated

and the

unvaccinated groups was about .8%,

less than 1%. They could have said, "This shot

lowers your actual risk by less than 1%," but they didn't.

They went with the bigger, scarier-sounding number, 95%,

and people made life-changing decisions based on that framing.

It wasn't technically a lie, but it was incredibly misleading, and

that should make you angry because it shows how much public opinion can be

manipulated by the way statistics are presented.

So whether it's food safety or medicine, statistics can be technically

true but still used to trick you. Next time you hear a

scary or amazing number in a headline, ask, are they talking about

relative risk or absolute risk? Relative risk, it sells

headlines. Absolute risk tells the truth.