Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting.

Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon, and I make podcasts for the BBC.

I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book.

But when I started commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts.

I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right mixture of sounds could take you into

a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to

give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole new

career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories that make

you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC

sounds. Hello and thank you for downloading the more or less podcast. We're the program that

looks at the numbers in the news and the world around us, and I'm Lizzie McNeil. Data can tell us a lot

of things, useful things like how many vaccines need to be administered and to who, what series you should

binge watch next, or how your ranking stands up in Diablo.

But sometimes the people interpreting data get the wrong end of the statistical stick.

Correlations get assumed to be causations and fingers get pointed in directions they probably shouldn't.

One such case was this stark headline.

The chance of survival is tripled if a black baby is looked after by a white doctor.

This came from a peer-reviewed paper published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

The researchers were looking into factors

that could reduce the mortality risk for black babies. And they found that if a black baby

is looked after by a white doctor, they were twice as likely to die. So headline didn't quite get

that bit right. This finding, obviously, and quite rightly, caused quite the media commotion.

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