The Goldilocks Number

Numbers sound so official. But sometimes, they’re not. Here’s my favorite officially misleading number ever:

50,000.

It’s sometimes known as the Goldilocks number.

Because 50k, especially with issues at a national scale, it’s a number that will catch your attention while remaining not too big, and not too small.

And if you need to report on a numeric value in a headline but there’s no clear and easy or perfect value to use, some “reporters” will default to “not too big and not too small.”

Chris Hansen, the “to catch a predator guy” (circa 2005), said law enforcement officials estimated that 50,000 predators were online at any given moment. Attorney General Alberto repeated the statistic. A few people started to wonder, who fact checked who?

Well, neither, as it turns out.

Ken Lanning, the expert at the network, blessed the use of the statistic as “reasonable,” but couldn’t confirm or deny it.

He cited reasons it could be wrong though.

For example, in the 1980s they used to estimate 50,000 kids were abducted by strangers every year.

Which, if you were in ‘80s kid, you definitely remember, because if you so much as lost track of your mom’s shopping cart while she turned a corner in the store, “Lord have mercy” (spoken in Uncle Jesse’s voice). You’re brain jumped straight into remembering survival techniques for when you were tied up and thrown in a trunk as the captors car races out of town.

Or, again - in the 1980s - satanic cults were were engaging in human sacrifices at about, go ahead and guess what rate/number… 50,000 per year!

Sorry to exclamate that. I know, not very goth of me at all. But those fears were weird too. One day you wear a little black and listen to some Slayer, the next day adults at school want to talk to you.

In the late 1990s, they started to break these 50k stats down Not before I had a few extra trips to the guidance counselors office. But, I appreciate knowing now that somebody applied their actual education to these problems.

The abducted children were plainly overestimated and that stat fell apart under only slight scrutiny. An improvement in the data collection labeling quickly showed about 200-300 kids as being abducted by strangers on an annual basis. Oops. And the satanic sacrifices? Those were immediately impossible to reconcile against the national homicide statistic of about 20,000 murders, which, not even fair satan himself could probably double and hide from the government.

And yet, 50,000 lives on. It’s actually a “death magnet” as Brooke Gladstone would later put it.

50,000.

It’s not real small, like 200 or something.

And it’s not real big, like 10 million or something.

Goldilocks.

Not too hot, not too cold.*

As Gladstone said in The Influencing Machine, “Sometimes the simplest reasons are the scariest.”

Anytime somebody is using a number in an argument, consider how much impact you’re letting it have on you, and do the rest of your homework about it accordingly.

Where does any number belong? What feels right? Is it not too hot and not too cold?

You’re going to want to think about it for yourself.

*”statistical gold” is the new “comedy gold” in my heart and mind now