Do you ever look beyond the “Sale – 60% off” signs? Usually you will find between “sale” and the figure that there are two tiny words inserted, “up to”. I immediately discount the deal as I know those two words mean it is a totally worthless offer.
But obviously many people - I guess - must fall for it, because sales people and marketing people still use those two heavily mitigating words.
The same principle can often be used with other walks of life. On the BBC’s lunchtime TV news on September 14 there was another very biased report on the review of stakes and prizes in gambling that is due next month. According to the report, online betting and fixed-odds betting terminals are in the firing line. And the wording of the introduction said that the “industry regulator estimates that up to two million people in the UK are problem gamblers.”
Which industry regulator? The UK’s Gambling Commission? It may be so but I have not seen that statistic attributed to the Gambling Commission before. And of course there are those two pestilential words “up to” prefixing the numbers. Those two words render the whole statistic meaningless but few people will have focused on that.
Two million? That is one-twentieth of the adult population, or five per cent, yet I was always led to understand that the real figure was less than one per cent. But who sets the benchmark for what is a “problem gambler”? It is interesting that the same day, in a huge and influential court case in Australia where a one-time problem gambler is suing both the casino and the machine manufacturer, the lawyer representing, in this case Aristocrat, was on his feet and the reporting said: “Mr Hopkins QC also questioned the definition of ‘problem gambler’ as defined by the complainant and the use of surveys as evidence.”
Quite right, too. If these leading and sweeping statements are going to be used in courts, or anywhere else, we have to know exactly who is saying them and how they arrive at the statistics. These important issues cannot be justified by woolly phraseology or they will have the same degree of credibility as “up to”.
