The awestruck know they don't always understand the statistics they hear, but this doesn't bother them. We need a different approach. One choice is to approach statistics critically. Instead, the critical attempt to evaluate numbers, to distinguish between good statistics and bad statistics. The critical understand that, while some social statistics may be pretty good, they are never perfect.
Every statistic is a way of summarizing complex information into relatively simple numbers.
Inevitably, some information, some of the complexity, is lost whenever we use statistics. The critical recognize that this is an inevitable limitation of statistics. Every statistic is a compromise among choices. Being critical means more than simply pointing to the flaws in a statistic. Again, every statistic has flaws.