3 ms·
I dislike these headlines techniques a lot, and they are very frequent - like the coldest March 1st in 23 years, or the warmest Jan 8th in 12.5 years, etc. The
by aksss 6y ago
I dislike these headlines techniques a lot, and they are very frequent - like the coldest March 1st in 23 years, or the warmest Jan 8th in 12.5 years, etc. The warmest Feb. in 30+ years (though not, evidently, in 40+ years).
We don't see headlines passed around when the day doesn't break any records, and the bar is raised or lowered seemingly to fit the need for a record. Take any day, and find the last time the temp was colder or warmer, set the headline to those parameters and gen up some more anxiety.
I'm skeptical of how useful headlines like this are for any purpose, and suspect they do more harm than good in terms of giving people a tin ear to any real problem.
- genericone 6y agoIts sports statistics, but climate statistics. People care enough to think perhaps the statistic has meaning, but its just another user engagement strategy. "The coldest 2nd tuesday of a leap year March on record in the last 100 years."
- aksss 6y agoThat’s a very apt analogy - any football game will have the same stuff: “he just set the record for the most yards run in a third quarter during a second playoff game that happened on a Tuesday, in the history of the NFL.”
- T-hawk 6y agoThis is known as the multiple-endpoints fallacy, where you deliberately pick the outlying data point after the fact and ignore all the mundane ones. Another example is when you see reports of some county experiencing a once-in-500-year flood, trying to establish the shock value of how unusual and terrible a catastrophe that is. But if you're observing 500 such counties, then every year that will happen to some one of them. You just never notice the 499 data points where it didn't.