{"id":2140,"date":"2021-06-09T10:04:26","date_gmt":"2021-06-09T10:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2021-06-09T10:04:26","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T10:04:26","slug":"fat-chance-writing-about-probability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/estatistica\/fat-chance-writing-about-probability\/","title":{"rendered":"Fat Chance: Writing about Probability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Bons conselhos sobre como comunicar incerteza, probabilidades e percentagens<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, almost every choice we have made in our day-to-day lives has required careful consideration of the odds. How dangerous is going to the supermarket at peak time? Is it safe to see friends after getting one vaccine shot? Will children get sick, or spread the virus to others, if they go back to school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just the quantity of decisions can be exhausting<\/a>. But there\u2019s something else making all of these choices so difficult: People, by and large, are bad at probability. We turn high odds into certainties, as when people assume that the accuracy of PCR tests for COVID means they\u2019ll always yield correct results, or when we think of relatively unlikely events, like catching the virus after being fully vaccinated, as impossible. And in between 100 percent certainty and zero chance, the way we interpret any given number can change radically based on how that probability is expressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such glitches in thinking aren\u2019t surprising, says journalist and statistician Regina Nuzzo, a professor of statistics at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, and a senior advisor for statistics communication and media innovation at the American Statistical Association. \u201cHuman brains hate probability, they hate ambiguity, they hate the uncertainty,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re just not wired to deal with this sort of thing very well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for science writers, avoiding uncertainty isn\u2019t an option. \u201cEverything [in science] is quantified by the likelihood or lack of likelihood of it happening,\u201d says science journalist Tara Haelle, who has written extensively about covering statistics for the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ). But as Haelle says, \u201cHumans don\u2019t make decisions that way.\u201d People tend to be far more comfortable with a definitive yes<\/em> or no<\/em>, she says, than with the uncharted space in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That means science writers have to work hard to coax readers away from those two extremes and toward a more nuanced understanding. \u201cProbability information is crucial to making a really informed decision,\u201d says psychologist Vivianne Visschers, who studies risk communication and decision making at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. Without a good understanding of such information, readers may ease up on pandemic social-distancing precautions too early, or avoid a medical examination that they want to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no single, straightforward way to write about probability. The very concept can be ambiguous and tricky. But strategies like using analogies, creating visuals, and making careful use of language can help to convey just what a 15 percent chance of an extreme weather event, or an 80 percent chance of recovering from a disease, really means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bons conselhos sobre como comunicar incerteza, probabilidades e percentagens Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, almost every choice we have made in our day-to-day lives has required careful consideration of the odds. How dangerous is going to the supermarket at peak time? Is it safe to see friends after getting one vaccine shot? Will children get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4066,102],"tags":[4098,4097],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-science","category-estatistica","tag-comunicao-em-cincia","tag-probabilidades"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2141,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/2141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.uac.pt\/amendes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}