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16 May 2013updated 26 Sep 2015 1:46pm

New browser plugin stops people bamboozling you with numbers

Dictionary of Numbers provides that much needed context.

By Alex Hern

I’ve written before about how numbers without context are meaningless. Remember the claim that “every year in Spain alone… between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms”? We’re used to things that number in the millions being a lot, but without context, our intuitions can mislead us. So, for instance, if I claimed that “every year in Spain alone, between 6 and 18 million bytes of pornography are downloaded”, your gut reaction might be that the Spanish are porn-hungry sex-fiends – until you realise that a moderately sized picture file is around one million bytes. That stat would in fact make Spain one of the most prudish countries in the world.

So, for the wind farm example, we found a few comparisons: in the US, power lines killed 130 million birds a year, while windows took between 100 million and almost a billion each year.

That’s useful – and served to put some scaremongering at rest – but we can’t all be looking up US Department of Agriculture papers when there’s a potentially misleading statistic. So rejoice! For there is now a Chrome extension that can do the same thing automatically.

Dictionary of Numbers “searches through the page for numbers it can understand, and when it finds one, adds an inline explanation for that number in human terms”. What that means is that a report of a forest fire destroying 297,845 acres of land is followed up by a little square bracket telling you “[≈ Hong Kong]”; something 100m high is [≈ height of the Statue of Liberty (foundation of pedestal to torch)].

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As Glen Chiacchieri, the developer of the extension, writes:

One could write Dictionary of Numbers off as a tool for mathematically-inclined folk, but the fact is that understanding and reasoning about numbers is an essential part of modern society. After all, it’s important to know just how much of the United States was on fire.

Sadly, the extension doesn’t yet have any comparisons for the figure “8 million birds”, so when it comes to dealing with the critiques of climate sceptics, we’re still going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. And while it’s handy for money in dollars, pound sterling leaves it upset and confused. But there’s a third problem with the plugin, as well. As Randall Munroe reports:

It can also come across as unexpectedly judgmental. Glen told me about complaint he got from a user: “I installed your extension and then forgot about it … until I logged into my bank account. Apparently my total balance is equal to the cost of a low-end bicycle. Thanks.”

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