Briefly

• Another example of asking people questions they can’t reasonably be expected to answer, at Newsroom. This is a survey from Forest and Bird, who asked about the proportion of NZ’s ocean that was, and that should be, in marine reserves.  The actual figure is 0.4%. People thought it was a lot more, and that it should be a lot more.  It’s possible the current general population estimate has been influenced by the Kermadec reserve that was proposed by the last government, which would have protected 15%, but I didn’t remember that figure so I don’t know.   The “Not Sure” figure for how much is currently protected is 23%, which is larger than you often see, but clearly still smaller than it should have been. Survey interviewers often push quite hard to get people to give a concrete answer, but I don’t know if that happened here
• A good post about the cost of false positives, in this case in detecting spammers on social media.
• Useful tools for interpreting the news: Molly White writes about cryptocurrency market caps and what they mean and don’t mean.
• Outside the usual range of StatsChat, but about the value of official statistics in policy debates.  Bret Devereaux (who you should read if you have any interest in ancient history or its depiction in movies and video games) is writing about the Gracchi, the land reformers of the 2nd century BCE.

Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.

In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.