The penguin problem

A note about Emperor penguins and big number blindness

A mistake made its way into the first print run of The Biggest Footprint due to a phenomenon we’re calling ‘the penguin problem’.

The penguin problem is a mental shortcoming that most people share, ourselves very much included, and it has consequences that go beyond typos in books.

Around 98 metres tall, the mega Emperor penguin is smooshed from an Emperor penguin population estimated at between 531,000 and 557,000, according to the British Antarctic Survey.

But in the middle of the long caption on page 31, we wrongly listed its population as 410 million. This was due to an error in copy-and-pasting from our working spreadsheet into the text of the book. The mega Emperor penguin is a recurring character, so the faulty number also appears in captions on pages 64 and 90. (The size of the penguin in the illustrations was calculated based on the correct numbers, so does not need to be revised for future editions.)

Mistakes can happen during the production of a book drawing on over a thousand data points. But how did this particular one go undetected? Probably in part because we and our editors found the 410 million figure to be reasonably plausible – despite being off by a factor of about 750!

The truth is our instincts for big numbers are like most people’s – not too good, especially when the numbers relate to things outside our day-to-day experience, like the size of penguin populations in the Antarctic.

For the sake of comparison, suppose we’d claimed that the average kitchen fridge was a kilometre high (an error of a similar magnitude). Someone would definitely have noticed that glaring mistake. That’s because we all have a grasp of the size of kitchens, but no comparable feel for the more global, abstract parameters of life on earth.

So this is what we’re terming the ‘penguin problem’ – a widely shared lack of good instincts regarding the big numbers about nature. Pretty much everyone is vulnerable to the penguin problem (at least that’s our excuse). And the reason it’s a problem is that, when it comes to understanding what’s going on at a planetary scale, big numbers are really all we have.

Any view of the world based on data will always be a work in progress and subject to revision. New and updated statistics, along with any other corrections, will be added to the Very big data section of this website as soon as we become aware of them. If you know of any relevant stats we ought to include on this website and in any future editions of our book, please get in touch.