In a UK local election in 2018, a tiny, newly formed centrist party standing in a London borough issued a briefing that cited the high percentage of voters who agreed with its policies. But the “policies” in question were just generic vagaries like “more housing” and “clean air.” The briefing’s conclusion — holding that these results demonstrated the party’s own popularity — was simply meaningless.

More recently, Tom Watson, deputy leader of Britain’s Labour Party, used an online poll promoted via social media without a trace of methodology or rigor to evidence support within Labour ranks for a second referendum on Brexit.

These deliberate and disingenuous uses of big numbers are not difficult to correct methodologically — in the first case, one could get a clearer answer by surveying attitudes towards the new party (or even its name recognition), while in the second one could draw on the multiple more detailed surveys of Labour members’ views on Brexit, presenting a nuanced picture.