‘Balanced’ Lotto reporting
From ChCh Press
Are you feeling lucky?
The number drawn most often in Saturday night’s Lotto is one.
The second is seven, the third is lucky 13, followed by 21, 38 and 12.
And if you are selecting a Powerball for Saturday’s draw, the record suggests two is a much better pick than seven.
The numbers are from Lotto Draw Frequency data provided by Lotto NZ for the 1406 Lottery family draws held to last Wednesday.
The Big Wednesday data shows the luckiest numbers are 30, 12, 20, 31, 28 and 16. And heads is drawn more often (232) than tails (216), based on 448 draws to last week.
In theory, selecting the numbers drawn most often would result in more prizes and avoiding the numbers drawn least would result in fewer losses. The record speaks for itself.
Of course this is utter bollocks. The record is entirely consistent with the draw being completely unpredictable, as you would also expect it to be if you’ve ever watched a Lotto draw on television and seen how they work.
This story is better than the ones we used to see, because it does go on and quote people who know what they are talking about, who point out that predicting this way isn’t going to work, and then goes on to say that many people must understand this because they do just take random picks. On the other hand, that’s the sort of journalistic balance that gets caricatured as “Opinions differ on shape of Earth.”
In world historical terms it doesn’t really matter how these lottery stories are written, but they are missing a relatively a simple opportunity to demonstrate that a paper understands the difference between fact and fancy and thinks it matters.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Hi Thomas, Reporters don’t usually aid statistical understanding. In 1984, I published an article “Testing the Golden Kiwi” in the NZ Statistician (Vol 1 No 1 pg. 33-36) showing flaws in the NZ lottery at the time. Officialdom at the time ignored it, but later an internal report promoting the switch to lotto referenced it. Interestingly enough the journalist from NZ Truth accurately reported the situation.
10 years ago
Bill,
They usually don’t, but that isn’t a law of nature. Reporters are overworked, and not trained in statistics, and a lot of their audience doesn’t care much.
We’re trying to improve things by providing contact numbers for reporters who want advice, getting more statistics into their training, and highlighting good and bad statistical reporting on StatsChat.
Statistical reporting probably won’t ever be as good as rugby reporting, but it has improved and can improve further.
10 years ago