More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by red-iron-pine » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

Modified3019 wrote: post #96

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".

XCOM should be added to the curriculum.

1 tile in front of alient

96% chance of hit

miss. twice.

question sanity.

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

#192

Post by close04 » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #188

close04 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not very familiar with how they work. Don't prediction markets give the individual gambler a boolean choice and this results in a picture of the split over the population? There's no granular option for the individual to bet 40% vs. 60% for something happening, the vote with 100% confidence that Spain wins the World Cup, they don't give 85% chance of winning.

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

#193

Post by diogenes_atx » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

As a grad student at a public university in the USA, I worked as a teaching assistant for the sociology class "Introduction to Statistics." The course used SPSS software to enable the students to perform statistical analysis on data sets. Although we offered an excellent textbook (listed below), most of the undergraduate students struggled with the material, so my colleagues and I added a supplemental reading list to the syllabus for those students interested in studying the main concepts. The following books are the ones we recommended to the students. I have read all these texts, and they are pretty good at explaining statistics to anyone interested in learning the material at a conceptual level; anyone can read and understand these books, regardless of their educational background.

Ian Ayres (2007) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart

Joseph Healey (2020) Statistics: A Tool for Social Research [This is the textbook used in the class, which I highly recommend]

Catherine Marsh and Jane Elliott (2008) Exploring Data: An Introduction to Data Analysis for Social Scientists, second edition

John Allen Paulos (1988) Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

Nate Silver (2012) The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2005) Fooled by Randomness, second edition;

_______ (2010) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, second edition

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

#194

Post by hinkley » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

mr_mitm wrote: post #63

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 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".

The word “most” is a mess. Strictly speaking the person with “the most” has the plurality, not even half. “Most people” can mean more than half, but is often used to mean or imply anything from a supermajority to “almost everyone”.

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

#195

Post by hinkley » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

victorbjorklund wrote: post #167

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".

And how people don’t get how probabilities work when run over repeated instances. Like it is only 0,1% risk that X happens everytime Y is done which sounds low but then it turns out Y is done Z number of times per day…

I hate that I have to talk to so many people about Russian Roulette just with more chambers. But it’s the only analogy that hits.

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

#196

Post by hinkley » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #129

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".

Fully agree. For example, I wish managers would be capable to handle the difference between a 40% and a 70% chance to meet the deadline.

One of the first managers I had who studied management theory commented once that if estimates were accurate, we’d get them done earlier than expected as often as we got them done later than expected, which is not true and thus we are doing something wrong.

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

#197

Post by hinkley » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #145

HPsquared wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No longer true. Rhetoric is now an epithet and when used as such means sophistry. Most people use it as an epithet.

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

#198

Post by hinkley » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

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

We are just as bad or worse with charts. I don’t know whether finding Tufte when I was still relatively young saved or harmed my sanity. Maybe both. Everyone’s charts are awful, including at least half of mine, and I was trying to be objective. Many people are just trying to prove a theory they had before the chart was made.

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

#199

Post by OroPla » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

LandR wrote: post #130

I 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.

In my head he answered "in my day and age we had the black plague, with a 90% death rate". (It was 50%, but who checks these numbers anyway.)

Guess we are so used to made up numbers and exaggerations that it's hard to take anything at face value.

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

#200

Post by _doctor_love » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

salviati wrote: post #26

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…

> Assuming you don't just make them up, they're trivial to manipulate to generate the headline you want. well encapsulated in the quote popularized by Mark Twain "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist... One of my favourite jokes: 93 % of statistics are made up on the spot, and 61 % of people believe them. Bonus points for changing the figures every ti…

Another good one: success in business is 40% people skills, 30% technical knowledge, 20% work ethic, and 15% basic math.