Jun 12, 2016 04:34 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 12, 2016 04:37 AM by C C.)
http://understandinguncertainty.org/risk...g-be-funny
EXCERPT: I’ve had a lot of publicity over the last few days, but none of it was welcome. It arose from the story below from the Daily Telegraph of June 6 with the headline “Britons are having less sex, and Game of Thrones could be to blame, says Cambridge professor”. [...] I really did say all this. At a talk for the general public at the Hay Festival plugging "Sex by Numbers", I was talking about the decline in sexual activity over the last 20 years identified by the NATSAL survey, and said that the press was obsessed with the reasons for this.
As a statistician, I couldn’t say why this decline had occurred, but Ipads have been mentioned. I then made the comments about box sets, and that this trend would mean there would be no sex by 2030 (I even got the sums wrong), and that this was very worrying – this was delivered with over-the-top enthusiasm, and got a gratifyingly big laugh from the audience. A standard use of ludicrous exaggeration as a source of humour (although it does lose somewhat in the retelling). In spite of the obvious joke, the Telegraph chose to report this as a serious scientific finding (although the article has now been re-written)....
EXCERPT: I’ve had a lot of publicity over the last few days, but none of it was welcome. It arose from the story below from the Daily Telegraph of June 6 with the headline “Britons are having less sex, and Game of Thrones could be to blame, says Cambridge professor”. [...] I really did say all this. At a talk for the general public at the Hay Festival plugging "Sex by Numbers", I was talking about the decline in sexual activity over the last 20 years identified by the NATSAL survey, and said that the press was obsessed with the reasons for this.
As a statistician, I couldn’t say why this decline had occurred, but Ipads have been mentioned. I then made the comments about box sets, and that this trend would mean there would be no sex by 2030 (I even got the sums wrong), and that this was very worrying – this was delivered with over-the-top enthusiasm, and got a gratifyingly big laugh from the audience. A standard use of ludicrous exaggeration as a source of humour (although it does lose somewhat in the retelling). In spite of the obvious joke, the Telegraph chose to report this as a serious scientific finding (although the article has now been re-written)....