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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

#211

Post by asa123 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #206
pmontra wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error It's basic when you are attending an undergraduate course but most people can understand mean (as a dictionary might generically define it) and have a general feeling for margin of error (again, not in the mathematical way.) Statistics has been the most difficult course in my CS course. For some reason when I start counting events to get a probability I fin…

With large sets or sequences of numbers approaching almost infinity, counting as a method of determining how large things are ... doesn't work well as you found out. To determine if ginormous set A is larger than ginormous set B, you have to do things like matching-pairing. For every element in set A, pair it with an element of set B; if you exhaust all of the elements in B but still have elements in A... then set A…

It seems like you are mostly talking about cardinality, or proofs of problems pertaining to them, and the person you are responding to is saying they struggle with combinatorics

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

#212

Post by d1sxeyes »

defrost wrote: post #177
sethammons wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the same as wealth, or any dataset that has large data outliers on one side. Average and mean are the same: normal distribution. Average higher than mean: skewed by big outliers. Professional statistician affects the distribution of statistics knowledge like billionaires affect wealth distribution.

Congrats for having a shot, sadly that doesn't answer the questions posed in the slightest. Again, why does the GP assume that a full half are distinctly lower than "average understanding" ? Why the assumption that multiple numbers cannot share an average understanding?

It was a joke, you are, of course, technically correct, there’s no requirement for the mean and median to be the same.

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

#213

Post by defrost »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #212
defrost wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats for having a shot, sadly that doesn't answer the questions posed in the slightest. Again, why does the GP assume that a full half are distinctly lower than "average understanding" ? Why the assumption that multiple numbers cannot share an average understanding?

It was a joke, you are, of course, technically correct, there’s no requirement for the mean and median to be the same.

Fair point, in my time zone it was late, I was crabby, and there was a surrounding context of "bad statistics" comments.

That said,

If the mean and median were the same your statement would still not be always true. For more than one reason.

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

#214

Post by Karrot_Kream »

michalsustr wrote: post #99
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistical reasoning isn't really motivated when it's taught, at least in the US. My schooling (I did jump around a bunch) assumed the student to have picked it up through vague balls-and-bins style problems taught in various units in various grade levels. By the time I took my statistics class in undergrad math, coming from a similar background to you, they just sort of assumed you had a head for combinatorics and…

Are the materials for the class on complex system failure analysis you had available online? Thank you.

Ugh no. You and the sibling commenter pushed me to do some searching but it looks like that class isn't offered anymore. It was a special class anyway (which is kinda common in grad schools.) I'll see if I can dig up some lecture notes from a long time ago.

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

#215

Post by maccard »

jampekka wrote: post #137
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…

10% may be a magnitude too high at least if we expect the explanation to be correct. For example in a sample of statisticians/epidemiologists only 12.5% got two basic features of p-values correct [1]. And there are a lot of studies showing similar levels of misunderstanding among people using p-values professionally. I use p-values daily. I can and do compute them using various methods, including by hand. But I'd sti…

P values are tricky, and I think you can get a lot out of knowing what they are without being able to compute them and use them reliably.

But statisticians not knowing the basics of the Null Hypothesis is absolutely terrifying!

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

#216

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #163
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates walked into a bar. Everyone was, on average, a multi millionaire.

Large bar.

Haha yes, should have said average billionaire!

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

#217

Post by rawgabbit »

asa123 wrote: post #211
rawgabbit wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With large sets or sequences of numbers approaching almost infinity, counting as a method of determining how large things are ... doesn't work well as you found out. To determine if ginormous set A is larger than ginormous set B, you have to do things like matching-pairing. For every element in set A, pair it with an element of set B; if you exhaust all of the elements in B but still have elements in A... then set A…

It seems like you are mostly talking about cardinality, or proofs of problems pertaining to them, and the person you are responding to is saying they struggle with combinatorics

Yes, you're probably right.

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

#218

Post by d1sxeyes »

defrost wrote: post #213
d1sxeyes wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a joke, you are, of course, technically correct, there’s no requirement for the mean and median to be the same.

Fair point, in my time zone it was late, I was crabby, and there was a surrounding context of "bad statistics" comments. That said, If the mean and median were the same your statement would still not be always true. For more than one reason.

No harm done :)

I’m interested, in what cases would it not be true if we assume “average” here to be “median”? I can only think of one: if we consider “understanding” to be discrete rather than continuous.

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

#219

Post by dr_dshiv »

breezybottom wrote: post #183
dr_dshiv wrote: post #62

“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.

Can you give an example of a fundamentally unintuitive idea?

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

#220

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #134
salviati wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> the quote popularized by Mark Twain "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" I’m increasingly convinced this is a thought-terminating cliche. Understanding the difference between a median, mean and mode is fundamentally empowering. Enough people, however, will stop themselves from trying to understand that by quoting such a joke.

I think it is rather a healthy skepticism.

Sure, a lot of people will not take their understanding any further, but most do not have the will or the time to do so.

Even knowing mean, mode and median is not enough. You really want standard deviation too. And that is just the basics.

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