A bit mean, maybe, but at least he broke through to people’s emotions.

He also used a nice comparison: “There is more money put into baldness drugs than into malaria,” Gates quipped, triggering laughter. “Now, baldness is a terrible thing and rich men are afflicted. That is why that priority has been set.”

I’ll link to the video once it’s posted.

Excerpt:

The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility–to weave sources of credibility into the idea itself.  Another way is to use statistics.  Since grade school, we’ve been taught to support our arguments with statistical evidence.  But statistics tend to be eye-glazing.  How can we use them while still managing to engage the audience?

Geoff Ainscow and other leaders of the “Beyond War” movement in the 1980s, were determined to find a way to address the following paradox: When we see a child running with scissors, we wince.  We shout at them to stop.  Yet when we read in the newspaper about nuclear weapons—with the power to destroy millions of children—it only provokes, at best, a moment of dismay.

“Beyond War” was started by a group of citizens who were alarmed by the arms race of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  By then, the combined Soviet and American nuclear arsenals were sufficient to destroy the world multiple times.  The “Beyond War” participants went door-to-door in their neighborhoods, hoping to  galvanize a public outcry against the arms race.

They struggled with how to make credible their belief that the arms race was out of control.  How do you make clear to people the staggering destructive capability of the world’s nuclear stockpile?  It’s so intangible, so invisible.  And yet telling stories, or providing details, seems inadequate: To grapple with the nuclear arms race requires grappling with the scale of it.  Scale relies on numbers.

“Beyond War” would arrange “house parties”—a host family would invite over a group of friends and neighbors and invite a Beyond War representative to speak to them.  Ainscow recounts a simple demonstration that the group would use in its presentations.  Ainscow would carry a metal bucket to the talk.  At the appropriate point in the presentation, he’d take a BB out of his pocket and drop it in the empty bucket.  The BB would make a loud clatter as it ricocheted and settled.  He’d say, “This is the Hiroshima bomb.” He would spend a few minutes describing the devastation of the Hiroshima bomb, the miles of flattened buildings, the tens of thousands killed immediately, the larger number of people with burns or other longer term health problems.

Next, he’d drop 10 BBs into the bucket.  The clatter was louder and more chaotic.  “This is the firepower of the missiles on one U.S. or Soviet nuclear submarine.”

Finally, he’d ask the attendees to close their eyes.  He’d say, “This is the world’s current arsenal of nuclear weapons.”  Then, Ainscow would pour 5,000 BBs into the bucket (one for every nuclear warhead in the world).  The noise was startling, even terrifying.  He says, “The roar of the BBs went on and on.  Afterward there was always dead silence.”

This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic.  Let’s unpack it a bit.  First, ”Beyond War” had a core belief: “The public needs to wake up and do something about the arms race.”  Second, they determined what was unexpected about the message: Everyone knew that the world’s nuclear arsenal had grown since World War II, but no one realized the scale of the growth.  Third, they had a statistic to make their belief credible—i.e., that the world had 5,000 nuclear warheads, when a single one was enough to decimate a city.  But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people.  The trick was to make this large number meaningful.

The final twist was the demonstration—the bucket and the BBs which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept.  Furthermore, the demonstration was carefully chosen—BBs are weapons, and the sound of the BBs hitting the bucket was fittingly threatening.

Notice something that may be counter-intuitive: The statistic didn’t stick.  It couldn’t possibly stick.  No one who saw the demonstration would remember, a week later, that there were 5,000 nuclear warheads in the world.

What did stick was the sudden, visceral awareness of a huge danger—the massive scale-up from World War II’s limited atomic weaponry to the present worldwide arsenal.  It was irrelevant whether there were 4,135 nuclear warheads or 9,437.  The point was to hit people in the gut with the realization that this was a problem that was out of control.

This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively.  Rarely will statistics be meaningful in and of themselves.  Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship.  It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than to remember the statistic.

Experiments showed that putting a “low fat” label on food caused everyone, especially overweight people, to underestimate its calories, to eat bigger helpings and to indulge in other foods.

The researchers found that customers at McDonald’s were more accurate at estimating the calories in their meal than were customers at Subway, apparently because of the health halo created by advertisements like one showing that a Subway sandwich had a third the fat of a Big Mac. The health halo from Subway also affected what else people chose to eat, Dr. Chandon and Dr. Wansink reported last year after giving people a chance to order either a Big Mac or a 12-inch Italian sandwich from Subway. Even though the Subway sandwich had more calories than the Big Mac, the people ordering it were more likely to add a large nondiet soda and cookies to the order. So while they may have felt virtuous, they ended up with meals averaging 56 percent more calories than the meals ordered from McDonald’s.

“People who eat at McDonald’s know their sins,” Dr. Chandon said, “but people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500 calories.” His advice is not for people to avoid Subway or low-fat snacks, but to take health halos into account.

Let’s say Slate charged its advertisers $30 per 1,000 ad impressions, a common industry rate. And let’s imagine for a second that the federal government decided to nationalize Slate in order to pay for the bailout. We’d need our readers to rack up enough page views to see 23.3 trillion banner ads before the feds were satisfied.

For historical perspective, consider that the Marshall Plan, which helped finance the recovery of Western Europe after World War II, cost the United States about $13 billion. Of course, in 2008 dollars that’s more like $100 billion. And Niall Ferguson has estimated that as a comparable share of the U.S. GDP, it’s more like $740 billion.

This story, and others like it, run the board on the traits of a sticky idea: They’re simple (Too much money!). Unexpected ($17,000 an hour!). Concrete ($6,000 shower curtains). Credible (the amounts are indisputable). Emotional (Outrage, envy, disgust). Story (Pick your CEO). And yet the public outcry never builds up to a roar. Only a half-hearted squawk.

I can’t explain it. Maybe people feel powerless to affect it. I.e., if you were really angry, to your core, about CEO pay, what would you do next? At least with global warming, you can switch out a  lightbulb. But sadly, there’s no incremental action with CEOs — you can’t take a dollar out of Fuld’s pocket. (Even if you did, it wouldn’t be worth his time to retrieve it, because in the next 10 seconds, he’d have made another $47.)

Another way to bring statistics to life is to contextualize them in terms that are more human, more everyday.  As a scientific example, contrast the following two statements:

1. Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy.  To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from the sun to the earth and hitting the target within 1/3 of a mile of dead center.
2. Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy.  To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting the target within 2/3 of an inch of dead center.

Which seems more accurate? 
As you may have guessed, the accuracy levels in both questions are exactly the same, but when different groups evaluated the two statements, 58% of respondents ranked the statistic about the sun to the earth as “very impressive.”  That jumped to 83% for the statistic about New York to Los Angeles.   We have no human experience, no intuition, about the distance between the sun and the earth.  The distance from New York to Los Angeles is much more tangible.  (Though, frankly, the distance is still far from tangible.  The problem is that if you make the distance more tangible—like a football field—then the accuracy becomes intangible.  “Throwing a rock the distance of a football field to an accuracy of 3.4 microns” doesn’t help.)

Miller says: “I’ll offer this suggestion for improving the analogy of throwing the rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting within 2/3 inch of dead-center. Units of distance are still too abstract. Better to say throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting a 50-cent piece (which has a radius of about 2/3 inches.)”

Great point, Greg — thanks for making us more concrete!