Lies and Statistics

With All Due Respect

This episode is brought to you by Anglican Aid. Your gift will strengthen churches and help transform communities. You can donate to With All Due Respect's featured causes here.

Mark Twain once famously said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics".

Our hosts this week are chatting about this third lie - statistics. With the age of social media now dictating how people access statistical data, are we literate enough to understand what we are reading when it comes to statistics? How does this affect trust in official information more broadly? And in a fallen world, where sin distorts everything, how much can we truly trust human knowledge?

Statistician Alan Brnabic joins Michael and Megan to discuss these questions, and why we need statistics more broadly.

Finally, our hosts cast their eye over Moneyball, a sports film that, against the odds, Megan quite enjoyed.

Help internally displaced people in Africa!

Disasters and conflicts have led to a record number of over 75 million internally displaced people, or IDPs, around the world. IDPs are people who have been forced to flee their homes but have not crossed international borders.

Almost half of all IDPs - more than the population of Australia and New Zealand combined - are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most of the displaced have left everything behind: their homes, belongings, and livelihoods. They urgently need food, shelter, clothing, and trauma counselling. So Anglican Aid has launched a Forced to Flee Emergency Appeal to provide essential aid to IDPs in Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, and beyond. This aid will be distributed by local churches, who are sacrificially providing for the needs of the displaced, and pointing them to the God who is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

To find out more about this appeal and make a tax-deductible gift, visit anglicanaid.org.au/wadr.