'9 out of 10 people' is usually 9 people
I looked into a statistic I had repeated confidently for two years. The sample was thirty-one respondents, self-selected, from one mailing list, and the question was worded so that disagreeing required effort. It was not a lie. Every step was disclosed somewhere. It just arrived in my head as a fact and left as a fact, and the trench coat did all the work in between. My new rule: before repeating a number, find out…