How is that in China?
More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
141–150 of 227 posts
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#142these are the self-aware ones. I worked with and trained hundreds of scientists; I would say 95% of them had at best a shaky understanding of basic probability and statistical concepts!!
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#143>> 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)
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Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#144I was having a conversation with my dad about how if a virus had a 10% death rate it would be terrifying. His reply was that 10% was nothing, that means you've got 90% chance to survive. Then said you've probably got a 10% chance of being hit by a bus every time you cross the road. Just absolutely no idea what probabilities are at all or ability to extrapolate probabilities from real world lived experience.
> His reply was that 10% was nothing
Ask him how many times he would roll that dice
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#145>> 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…
It's the mathematical version of learning rhetoric. Rhetoric teaches how to argue with words. Statistics is the same, but with numbers.
Not quite.
Rhetoric is persuasion under the presupposition that what you are trying to persuade someone of is true. Sophistry is indifferent to the truth and is merely concerned with results. Rhetoric respects the humanity of the interlocutor. Sophistry seeks to exploit him.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amd less than 2 legs. If even one person has 1 leg, then the average is strictly less than 2.
I’ve heard this phrased as “the average person has an above average number of legs”.
Wouldn't "the typical person has above average number of legs" or some such be better?
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#147This 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…
Are you talking about actual academic work or the pop- version of it? Because most of the damage I see is in pop-psychology, pop-sociology. In my limited experience looking into the topic humanities researchers make specific balanced claims backed with some numbers and reasoning, and all the nuance gets lost when translated to news articles and pop-sci books or videos
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#148Everyone is hating on statistics, yet HN posts studies all the time.
Yes, stats can be used deceptively or incompetently used, but they are generally useful. You just have to look at the full study to see what the starting data was and all the actions taken on it. Then you have to make a judgements call on if/how you want to apply that to your own choices, political policies, etc.
A great example of a stats being used by two sides of an argument and political positions would be gun control. See Everytown Research and Crime Prevention Reseach Center. You can see what gets measured, included, excluded, etc by each side and how those results get fitted for support of political policy.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article reads like work of a crackpot. There’s a reason why maths is done the way it is, and intimidating people is definitely not the motivation.
Bret Victor is awesome. I especially like his “Inventing on Principle” talk and his “Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction” article. https://vimeo.com/906418692 https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
That doesn’t make that Kill Math article better
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#150That headline is pretty generous... 62% is quite a bit more than half. It's actually more than 3/5. I'd even go so far to say it's nearly two thirds.