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More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

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Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#101

Post by Ekaros »

charcircuit wrote: post #100
bruce511 wrote: post #16

>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation) I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0. Indeed, statistically, n…

>mean versus medians This is a tests of knowledge of definitions than actual statistical knowledge.

But definitions are very much important when discussing statistics. Being able to communicate using correct terminology is important. Part of knowledge is being able to ingest statistics produce by someone else.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#102

Post by d1sxeyes »

bruce511 wrote: post #16

>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation) I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0. Indeed, statistically, n…

Half of all Americans have lower than average understanding of statistics (or at least, lower understanding than the average American)

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#103

Post by somenameforme »

bruce511 wrote: post #80
quijoteuniv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to probe the political orientation of the people who understand and those who don’t and see if there is some correlation there.

My thesis is that no-one understands. So there's no political orientation. Your suggestion suggests that a little bit of technical education would change political allegiance. Alas that is incorrect. Politics is about worldview (me and mine versus you and yours) and a world view cannot be changed by something as mundane as education. Each person has both a self-centered side, and a community-centered side. For some i…

A bit of a tangent, but I don't think it's really fair to say it's about self vs community. I think the main reason that people start to lean in a different direction as they age is because you start to see cracks in the ideals you held when younger. The internet is a good example. Many of us lived through the birth of the mainstreaming of the internet. And our perspectives of what the future held at that moment was generally just exceptionally naive. For those who are a bit younger, a similar phenomena played out with the rise of social media as well.

And as you see how reality and society tend to 'really' work, wisdom in other words, it tends to result in a shifting perspective on the ideal way forward for society. I'm certainly much more socially minded than when I was younger now. And I also think that's fairly typical - like most young people I was completely self absorbed which makes 'real' social mindedness quite uncommon. Yet my political leaning is gradually shifting ever more towards the 'self centered' orientation, in your terminology.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#104

Post by cm2187 »

This is also a political problem. Most of the debates about racism for instance are between people who are illiterate in term of basic statistics, on both sides of the debate. They take extreme tails of distributions as benchmarks, think in term of stereotypes rather than distributions, infer rules from a handful of samples, etc. It makes the whole exercise sterile.

It is not just journalists and politicians that are guilty of that. I see that from many academics who should know better, particularly in humanities departments.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#105

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

cm2187 wrote: post #104

This is also a political problem. Most of the debates about racism for instance are between people who are illiterate in term of basic statistics, on both sides of the debate. They take extreme tails of distributions as benchmarks, think in term of stereotypes rather than distributions, infer rules from a handful of samples, etc. It makes the whole exercise sterile. It is not just journalists and politicians that are…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning> affects us all. I'd like to believe education is an antidote, but really the only antidote is... not doing that.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#106

Post by defrost »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #102
bruce511 wrote: post #16

>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation) I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0. Indeed, statistically, n…

Half of all Americans have lower than average understanding of statistics (or at least, lower understanding than the average American)

Really?

Why not 5% of Americans having the same average level of understanding and only 47.5% having a lower than average understanding?

What assumptions are you making, and why should they be true?

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#107

Post by ViscountPenguin »

maccard wrote: post #31

> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values? I suspect that it’s far far less than 38% of people who actually understand statistics to this level. I suspect if someone on HN went around and asked their co workers to explain what a P value is in 2 sentences, it would be less than 10% of a (presumably) highly educated workforce. I suspect about 40% of adults are unable to tell the difference between mean…

In my experience, a not insignificant chunk of students actively in a stats class think that a p value is the probability of the null hypothesis. My money is on more like 3% of educated professionals.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#108

Post by ViscountPenguin »

piskov wrote: post #61
jdw64 wrote: post #27

What does it really mean to properly understand p-value? What I remember is that if the p-value is less than 0.05, the research result is considered statistically significant. That's about as far as my memory goes. I know that's actually a misunderstanding, but that's how most people understand it. I'm not sure how much I need to know to say I truly understand it.

It is mumbo jumbo (also people hearing “significant” treat this as “effect/change is large and important” which is in no relation to the actual amount of change). Low p-value basically means how surprising your data would be if there were actually no effect (ie less than 5% of the time you’ll get this due to randomness if there is no change — which is rather impossible) Sample size matters heavily. With more observat…

One of the really awkward points of stats is that not only does sample size matter, but also model specification. Very small misspecifications can easily lead to infinitesimal P values over large sample sizes.

Similar things are true of Bayesian stats, leading to things like predictively oriented posteriors being studied nowadays.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#109

Post by jltsiren »

shrubby wrote: post #38
bruce511 wrote: post #16

>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation) I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0. Indeed, statistically, n…

I started thinking about this percentage on decision makers around the world and got a chuckle. I've been trying to talk about the median vs. mean with a bunch of politicians on themes around the zillionaires, wealth or consumption and for most parts they're clueless. Or the ones with degrees still go with the normal (mean that skews the normal) as they're afraid. I just happened to get a copy of naked statistics yes…

> And my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

In the university I went to, Department of Statistics used to be part of the Faculty of Social Sciences. It was impossible to graduate from social sciences without taking a few classes of statistics. Then in some reorganization, Department of Statistics merged with Department of Mathematics. Except that old-school statisticians didn't want to move to the Faculty of Science, and they somehow managed to keep their offices in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

#110

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

arjie wrote: post #18

> The survey showed that 62% of U.S. adults self-report having little to no idea what statistics or statistical concepts like p-values are, but 90% of them would base decisions on reported statistics at least sometimes if they understood them better. You're kidding, right? 38% self-report more than that? If their self-report were accurate it would imply an education system that has truly excelled.

Yeah I figure I'm "well educated" and I never took a real statistics class and so never learned the definition of a p-value. I also don't know about the Wars of the Roses or Millard Fillmore. I did learn about Hildegard von Bingen and Laguerre polynomials.
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