I was delighted to welcome Professor David Spiegelhalter to the Agency yesterday to give the fourth in our series of Chief Scientist lectures. David is not only a distinguished statistician, but also the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. As a Bayesian statistician, he told us his philosophy was informed by two principles, firstly that probability does not exist and secondly all models are wrong, but some are more useful than others. It's always encouraging in my experience when professors are willing to show some humility about their models!
What interested me was the different ways he has been experimenting with visually representing risks, for example using bar charts of icons, and pictures of smiley and sad faces to illustrate the numbers of people who, on average, will get bowel cancer over a lifetime (5 in 100) and how the risk changes if you eat bacon sandwiches (an extra 1) etc etc. It would be great to see how consumers react to these visual methods and how this might inform the way that we in the Agency communicate risk.
For those of you who haven’t heard David speak on the subject of risk, you can see him on the following link: www.youtube.com