This TED Talk features data editor Mona Shalabi, recorded live at TED NYC 2017.

Now, I'm going to be talking about statistics today. If that makes you immediately feel a little bit wary, that's okay. That doesn't make you some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist. It makes you skeptical. And when it comes to numbers, especially now, you should be skeptical. But you should also be able to tell which numbers are reliable and which ones aren't. So today I want to try to give you some tools

to be able to do that. But before I do, I just want to clarify which numbers I'm talking about here.

I'm not talking about claims like nine out of ten women would recommend this anti-aging cream.

I think a lot of us have always rolled our eyes at numbers like that. What's different now

is that people are questioning statistics like the US unemployment rate is 5%.

What makes this claim different is that it doesn't come from a private company, it comes from the government.

And actually now, about four out of ten Americans distrust the economic data that gets reported by government.

Among supporters of President Trump, it's even higher. It's about seven out of ten.

Now, I don't need to tell anyone here

that there are a lot of dividing lines in our society right now. And a lot of them start to make

sense once you understand people's relationships with these government numbers. See, on the one hand,

there are those who say that these statistics are crucial, that we need them to make sense of society

as a whole in order to move beyond emotional anecdotes

and measure progress in this objective way.

And then there are the others who say that these statistics are elitist, maybe even rigged.

They don't make sense and they don't really reflect what's happening in people's everyday lives.

Now it kind of feels like that second group is winning the argument right now.

We're living in a world of alternative facts where people don't find statistics,

this kind of common ground, this starting point for debate.

This is a problem.

There are actually moves in the US right now to get rid of some government statistics altogether.

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