Spotting Misleading Numbers
Like Duolingo, but for Spotting Misleading Numbers. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
For the part of you with thirty open tabs that never became anything.
A short one: 11 levels across 2 sections, about 22 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Quick Sanity Checks and Spotting Statistical Sleight of Hand. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Spotting Misleading Numbers
- Dividing a national aggregate by the country's population gives the per-person share
- A huge headline figure can translate to just about one dollar per citizen
- Rounding numbers to the nearest power of ten reveals immediately if an estimate is in the right ballpark
- Order-of-magnitude checks are designed to filter out absurd errors before doing exact arithmetic
- Annual totals often sound staggering because they accumulate over 365 days or 8,760 hours
- Dividing by smaller time intervals (days, hours) reveals the real-world pace of an event
- The entire global population is roughly 8 billion people
- Memorizing a few baseline anchors makes claims that exceed physical reality stand out instantly
- A 100% relative increase sounds massive even when the actual absolute increase is only 1 extra person in 10,000
- Relative risk hides the starting baseline to make trivial changes look dramatic
- Correct Numbers evaluates risk by comparing actual counts rather than multiplying percentages
- A percentage point is the simple arithmetic difference between two percentages
- A percentage change measures how much the rate grew relative to its original size
- Confusing percentage points with percent change makes modest adjustments sound astronomical
- Percentages without base sample sizes obscure whether a shift involves a handful of cases or millions
- A huge percentage increase can come from moving from 1 incident to 6 incidents
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Spotting Misleading Numbers the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
A news article reports a massive national aggregate budget. How can you find what it actually means for an individual?
Get it right to open this lesson and 10 more in the app.
Where Spotting Misleading Numbers takes you
Cut through confusing statistics, sensational headlines, and deceitful graphs. Build practical mental checks to test whether numerical claims in daily life actually hold up.
- 1
Quick Sanity Checks
- Sizing Up Numbers on the Fly
- Unmasking Percentages and Risk
- 2
Spotting Statistical Sleight of Hand
- Decoding Graphs and Averages
- Finding What Numbers Leave Out
2 sections · 4 units · 11 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Spotting Misleading Numbers is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Spotting Misleading Numbers today.
Download Tomo, search Spotting Misleading Numbers, and play your first lesson in under a minute.