"When numbers deceive"

Great book excerpt in The Week about how uninformed people are regarding statistics and their interpretation:

We often talk of social statistics, especially those that seem as straightforward as age, as if a bureaucrat were poised with a clipboard, peering through every window, counting; or, better still, had some machine to do it for them. The unsurprising truth is that, for many of the statistics we take for granted, there is no such bureaucrat, no machine, no easy count. What is out there, more often than not, is thick strawberry jam, through which someone with a bad back on a tight schedule has to wade—and then try to tell us how many strawberries are in it.

I was taken aback, though, by the final paragraphs, asserting (with glee) that people change their position on the abortion/choice issue once they are correctly informed about the number of abortions that occur:

Few of us spend our leisure hours looking up and memorizing data. But many of us flatter ourselves that we know about these issues. And yet …

On abortion and immigration, says Ranney, about 80 percent of those questioned base their opinions on inaccurate information.
[ . . . ]
The students’ estimates for the number of abortions varied widely, but the middle of the range was about 5,000 for every million live births. The actual figure in the United States in 2006 was 335,000 per million live births—67 times higher than the typical estimate.
[ . . . ]
The good news: Many respondents found the correct answers so surprising that they adjusted their political views on the spot.