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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

#111

Post by wongarsu »

331c8c71 wrote: post #81
mr_mitm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people had an intuitive understanding of probabilities. It seems the average person can only think in terms of "basically never happens", "fifty fifty" and "sure thing".

I think almost everyone threw a dice quite a few times while playing board games.

Maybe people would have a better understanding of percentages if 20-sided dice were used more. "This has a 95% chance to succeed" -> roll a d20, anything but 1 is a success

Meanwhile 6-sided dice don't map to nice numbers, and having two dice makes the maths even harder to intuit

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

#112

Post by apexalpha »

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…

This isn't new. "Lies. Damned lies and Statistics" as a phrase is already quite old.

Many people selectively shop around statistics that match their prejudice or their social circles social etiquettes.

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

#113

Post by NoboruWataya »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #35

I'd say in reality it's way more than that. The first statistics course in uni was a very humbling experience. I realised that while I thought I understood a lot (and I was coming from a CS heavy background, olympiads and such) real statistics is way harder and a lot more counterintuitive than I thought. Granted, this talks about "basic" statistical understanding, but even that is way more complicated than most peopl…

Yeah. Like most people, my only experience of statistics is studying as part of maths in secondary school. I was really strong in maths generally and most of it came relatively easily to me, but I struggled with statistics. Examples like the Monty Hall problem show just how unintuitive the basic concepts are.

Given how effective stories and anecdotes are in convincing people, it really seems like the human brain is not wired to grasp these concepts easily.

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

#114

Post by shrubby »

jltsiren wrote: post #109
shrubby wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a bachelor of social services and healthcare from applied side so if statistics we're mentioned they must've been in the small print.

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

#116

Post by shrubby »

shrubby wrote: post #114
jltsiren wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm a bachelor of social services and healthcare from applied side so if statistics we're mentioned they must've been in the small print.

And I took some math in university before dropping out of CSC decades ago, so it isn't too hard, but my hunch is that with the BSs students the statistics in decent level would've been too much anyway.

Dunno really.

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

#117

Post by CM30 »

Makes me wonder what the numbers are like in other countries. There's a lot of talk here about issues with the American education system and what not, but I suspect the numbers would be about the same in many other places too.

Like, if I asked the average person here in the UK what a p-value was, I suspect the majority either wouldn't know or would have barely heard of the idea. I suspect those numbers wouldn't change much in other countries, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or South America.

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

#118

Post by larodi »

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…

the title, in respect to the content, is super lame "more than half"... dude what is "more" and how much more, and are we talking the upper bound or lower bound of the "more". perhaps we can conclude, the author demonstrates perfectly the principle that he tries to convene... few people are ready to work with statistics.

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

#119

Post by magicalhippo »

gloryjulio wrote: post #30
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…

Exactly. 38% is way too high. Are we sure about that? Statistics is not some required learning in school. Even those who learned (me for example) cannot confidently claim what it actually means. I would say most of the people don't have a clue what statistics mean

Here in Norway, statistics has been introduced in 9th and 10th grade (15 and 16 year olds). Here[1] is what a 9th grader is supposed to know at the end of the school year. Some key points translated to English:

- Interpret and critically evaluate statistical representations from the media and the local community.

- Calculate measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion in custom and real datasets, and use the results to describe the data.

- Calculate and evaluate probability in statistics and games.

This came after my time, and our PIRSA score aren't the best so perhaps practice is lacking.

[1]: https://www.udir.no/lk20/mat01-06/kompetansemaal-og-vurderin...

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

#120

Post by jcgl »

ngruhn wrote: post #43
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.

Agree. I think it's more important to understand statistical fallacies (selection bias, regression to the mean, survivorship bias, etc). Those are extremely common trip wires but to recognize them you don't need to memorize formal definitions.

Agreed. And throw in some Bayesian thinking too (like the Farmer and the Librarian).
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