About the talk:

Przemysław is an applied medical statistician whose most recent hobby is tracking down misuses of statistics in the press and searching for visualisations that stretch the truth. He strives to promote statistical literacy and critical, data-driven thinking in mainstream Poland.

Recorded during: TEDxKraków 2012

About the speaker:

At this year's TEDxKrakow, Przemyslaw introduced his own version of TED as it applies to statistics: Track down, Entertain and Discover. Statistics underlie everything, from the Higgs boson discovery to making the work of modern geneticists possible – to the statistics we’re more familiar with, such as its use in politics or social media. However, statistics can deceive, can be boring, and can be mathematical. Too often, statistics are misused or misunderstood.

Przemysław believes that Poland’s economic and social development depends on reasoning based on reliable data and appropriate analyses. This is impossible if the statistics presented by the popular Polish press are misused, misinterpreted or just plain wrong. To that end, his mission is to provide reliable data sets that describe the status of and changes in Poland, display this data in a clear visual manner, and to share the results in a clear and understandable way.

In order to gain better access to data, Przemysław co-founded SmarterPoland as a non-profit scientific foundation. Since then, it has become a well-known and reliable data repository of the state of and changes in Poland. It is also a source of reliable conclusions based on the data presented in a manner understandable to an intelligent reader.