In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, your host Sam Knowles is joined by Olivia Jensen, Director of the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR) based at the National University of Singapore.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 13 March 2024.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

IPUR is a research institute that seeks to narrow the gap between people’s perceptions and real-world risks, focused on the data and technology, environment and climate, and health and lifestyle. The Institute brings together basic science, engineering, social sciences, and the humanities.

Olivia Jensen is a passionate advocate and deeply pragmatic practitioner in the art and science of closing the gaps that exist between expert knowledge about risk and public perception of risk. IPUR and the global risk community of which it forms an integral part aims to empower citizens and societies to make better decisions about risk.

Olivia believes that risk-evidence communication is as much about getting experts to understand how and why citizens make decisions as it is about experts explaining the evidence to those citizens.

In considering risk evidence communication under uncertainty, we inevitably talk about Government communication under COVID. Olivia believes that the Government in Singapore got things “just about right”, clearly communicating regularly-updated data and basing its policy decisions on evidence. Sam is rather less complementary about the British Government’s over-politicised use of data in its pandemic communication.

One of the real challenges of risk evidence communication is looking back on events, with narratives constructed that fall victim to hindsight bias. Just because something was possible and it happened doesn’t mean it was inevitable.

Outside of the world of risk, Olivia is a passionate dancer, and in 2024 is learning to tango.

EXTERNAL LINKS

IPUR home page https://ipur.nus.edu.sg

Olivia’s IPUR profile https://ipur.nus.edu.sg/team/olivia-jensen/

IPUR’s EdX course “Understanding and Communicating Risk” https://bit.ly/4dcqQip

Understanding Risk https://understandrisk.org

Risk Know How – a joint venture with Sense About Science https://riskknowhow.org

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, your host Sam Knowles is joined by one of the world’s finest data storytellers, David Spiegelhalter, the statistician and public communicator of his generation. Although he claims to have been retired for five years, the Emeritus Professor of Statistics from Cambridge University is working harder than ever.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 6 March 2024.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

If anyone can be said to have had “a good pandemic”, it was David. “At least I had something to do!” he quips, sharing how he quickly set up a studio at home and gave countless interviews about what the data meant and what we should do as a result.

While he believes that the Chief Scientific and Medical Officers of the U.K. National Health Service usually presented complex information simply and straightforwardly to a willing and receptive public – hungry for evidence of what they might choose to do and why – Government ministers (to the very top) and their Special Advisors (SPADs) had little clue.

Nothing gets David more irritated than wilful misuse of data, and several times during our lively discussion he vents considerable fury at peddlers of misinformation, under COVID and otherwise. We talk a lot about communicating risk (relative and absolute), particularly under uncertainty, with uncertainty the theme of David’s imminent new book, The Art of Uncertainty (to be published by Penguin in September 2024).

Away from the stats lab, we learn how David applied his data-driven smarts to winning the inaugural (and to-date only) Loop World Championship; Loop is pool played on an elliptical table with only one pocket at one of the foci of the ellipse. He also took an evidence-based approach to qualifying for the second round of Winter Wipeout, recorded a dozen years and more ago in Argentina, where David adopted the persona of Professor Risk.

In addition to uncertainty, we also focus on trustworthiness. For David, those using data and statistics to communicate need to earn and constantly re-earn a reputation for being trustworthy. And just as no-one laughs at a comedian who says “I’m funny” at the start of his set, no-one trusts a person using data to communicate complex topics who says “Just trust me!”. Being seen as trustworthy is a consequence of being honest, competent, and reliable.

David introduces Sam and the audience to the skill of “pre-bunking”, and several times warns against building data-driven narratives that push emotional levers or buttons. Data storytellers should present the evidence simply and fairly and then allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. “Treat them as if they’re intelligent, but also as if they don’t know anything.”

EXTERNAL LINKS

Cambridge University personal profile page https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/

David on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spiegelhalter

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

After our fourth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Four of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between July and December 2023.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Four, our guests included:

Tracey Brown, director of the charity, Sense About Science.

Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis.

John McFall, military and civvy street logistics expert, and the founder of Supply Chain Wise.

Kieran Maguire, leading football finance academic from the University of Liverpool’s Management School, and co-host of The Price of Football podcast.

Ian Makgill, founder of Spend Network, a database keeping tabs on the worlds’ Governments’ $13tn spend.

And Mike Bell, data visualiser extraordinaire, who uses the iconography of the London Underground to tell the stories of bands, albums, films, and political careers at his eponymous business, Mike Bell Maps.

Data Malarkey will have its usual, between-season break for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back with Season Five on 8 May 2024, and there’s another glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of statistics, risk management, consumer goods, academic publishing, financial analysis, and autism research. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with the blockbuster guest, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a man who had perhaps the best pandemic of any data storyteller in the public domain.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.