I actually think this is very good. People thinking they understand statistics is far more dangerous and causes far more issues that people honestly saying they don’t…
More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
181–190 of 227 posts
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#182I would be more likely to believe the results if they tested these adults and not asked them. There's a big ego hit in admitting you don't know something. And many people are brought up thinking that it's a shame not to know something and that someone is better for knowing something. Like, a better person, not just better in some field.
And then the second question was:
“How often would you base decisions on reported statistics if you understood it better?”
Talk about a leading question. I get that they were tacking on their “study” to a larger question pool, but they could have put more effort in to the questions or done some actual testing.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#183“Fortunately, concepts in statistics are grounded in intuition and rationality.“ Yeaaah… let’s talk about that. Seems like a fair bit of stats were designed to intimidate —so as to get people to stop asking questions. Or at least that is the effect! Stats designed for intuition are few. See Kill Math for how it might be done: https://worrydream.com/KillMath/
I don't think it's a question of design. Some ideas in stats are just fundamentally unintuitive. Pedagogy can help mitigate this, but it would take a revolution to fit it into a neat and intuitive framework, like calculus.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#184LIES!
We all know 20% more also means take 20% off gets us the exact same value.
NEXT!
No? Isn't that the beauty of gullibility?
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
A probability that isn't computed (or reasonably computable) is just a personal feeling. Your 40% or 70% aren't probabilities if you didn't compute the probability of at least the key events involved to arrive at the number. People say a number as their confidence to meet the deadline on a scale from 0-100.
They're credences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(statistics) Everybody has them, and they're not useless. Usually they're regularly updated when new information comes in.
I'm not saying they're useless, they're an educated guess, a valuable means of communicating an expert opinion. It can be replaced with "I have high confidence of success".
The assessment is subjective, includes personal beliefs, assumptions, etc. not just measurable objective points. The measurement uncertainty at every step and the confidence interval are disappointing despite people using percentages, suggesting confidence to the percent. A scale from 1 to 5 is most of the times just as accurate.
2 people looking at the same situation could have very different degrees of belief, which is why 2 engineers could give very different estimates. But if I say I believe the likelihood of something is 73.8% I might be more credible to the listener. Looks like I calculated, not like the guy who said "3 out of 5 we get it done".
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#186LOL, 62%? that seems low ...
I would say the overwhelming majority of even university faculty members lack a basic understanding of statistics.
In their heads, they’re doing something closer to informal Bayesian reasoning: they have prior beliefs based past observation, previous research, experience, etc., wich is then all baked into every choice and decision
But when it comes time to write the paper, they translate that into frequentist statistics: p-values. As if all should be compared to random chance: significance thresholds, confidence intervals.
They do this to give their conclusions formal credibility: oh look how compelling my result is, I found all this new surprising stuff.
Close to 100% of life sciences research works that way.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#187I recommend every youth take a week to a month to try to read and internalize the book "Once upon a number." It's full of those odd statistical paradoxes that seem impossible but once you really wrap your head around them you realize how oversimplified your prior understanding of probability was.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're credences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(statistics) Everybody has them, and they're not useless. Usually they're regularly updated when new information comes in.
I'm not saying they're useless, they're an educated guess, a valuable means of communicating an expert opinion. It can be replaced with "I have high confidence of success". The assessment is subjective, includes personal beliefs, assumptions, etc. not just measurable objective points. The measurement uncertainty at every step and the confidence interval are disappointing despite people using percentages, suggesting c…
Cue prediction markets etc. There are mechanisms to aggregate this and have a wisdom of crowd effect.
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#189I 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
Fittingly, he would be rolling that die
Re: More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem is that convincing yourself that you are smarter than your younger self with opposite views, means that you are right about the politics now, is just a fallacy.
The change doesn't come from thinking one is smarter or dumber, but you simply having much more information to work with. We form extensive opinions and views about the world relatively young, but it's largely based on things we have 0 personal knowledge or experience of.
Again I think the internet/social media are perfect examples. Predicting what would happen isn't about being smart or dumb. It's a matter of just not having enough real world experience to even begin to formulate meaningful views. And so the views and expectations we did form were quite out of touch with what really happened and indeed what we probably 'should' have expected to happen all along.