Do the figures speak for themselves? Rarely, warns Russ Swan.
We’re constantly seeing opinion polls about things that we don’t need to be told, like who will win the next election or whether it’s a good idea to bomb children, but rarely on the vital stuff like ‘are scientists sexy?’ or ‘what’s your favourite strain of drosophila?’
Even the polls we do see are regularly presented in a skewed fashion. For example, the latest (at the time of writing) YouGov measure of public mood could be presented as showing that Britons are happy and content. Given a choice of six emotions, the largest number (48 per cent) chose ‘happy’ while only 32 per cent were ‘sad’.
But here’s the kicker: participants were not restricted to one emotion. Adding together ‘happy’ and ‘content’ gives a score of 74, while ‘sad’ plus ‘frustrated’ gives 73 – no significant difference. The three positives – happy, content and optimistic – tallied 92, while the three negatives – sad, frustrated and stressed – gave 100.
Beware of statistics, for they can mean whatever you want them to. Or whatever they want them to.
The last four years have seen political instability at home, wars around the world, financial turmoil and soaring inflation. We are enduring a viral pandemic, and now face an existential threat in the exponential growth of AI. All this alongside a disturbing tendency by those seeking power to dismiss science as biased and consider education as dangerous.
The good news is that Britons still think science education is essential. Since 2019 the proportion saying that teaching science at secondary school is very or quite important is virtually unchanged at 94 per cent. Within that, though, there is an appreciable softening of views, with a marked shift from ‘very’ to ‘quite’.
A disturbing tendency by those seeking power to dismiss science as biased and consider education as dangerous
The prominence of science in battling Covid-19, regardless of the inept bumbling of our politicians, might have been expected to do the opposite and harden opinion on this, but presumably the braying voices of the vaccine sceptics have played a part here.
On that, the opinion trackers provide some real insight. Asked in 2019, before anybody had heard of Covid, whether they believed vaccines had harmful effects which were not being disclosed, only three per cent thought this was definitely true. By late 2023 this had grown to nine per cent – still a minority but significantly more than before.
In contrast, those thinking this was definitely false (ie, vaccines are safe) soared from 40 to 47 per cent at the turn of 2021, just as the first vaccine was approved. Hurrah for science, you might think. This confidence was maintained for just a year until it began to slide, and now sits below the pre-pandemic score at just 35 per cent. Extrapolation is dangerous, but the graph is certainly pointing downward.
If all of this makes you just want to stop the world and get off, well, you’re not alone. Just over a third of us would ‘travel to outer space’, while those who would stay here have edged up slightly from 50 to 54 per cent. Disregarding the rather quaint phrase (surely outer space nowadays is reserved for travel beyond Earth orbit, not a ten-minute ride on a billionaire’s penis compensator), it gives us hope that we might yet, collectively, determine to make the best of what we’ve got.
