October 6, 2007
Mark Liberman has a great post over at Language Log (which for some reason I've been neglecting) about people's resistance to learning about statistics.
Until about a hundred years ago, our language and culture lacked the words and ideas needed to deal with the evaluation and comparison of sampled properties of groups. Even today, only a minuscule proportion of the U.S. population understands even the simplest form of these concepts and terms. Out of the roughly 300 million Americans, I doubt that as many as 500 thousand grasp these ideas to any practical extent, and 50,000 might be a better estimate. The rest of the population is surprisingly uninterested in learning, and even actively resists the intermittent attempts to teach them, despite the fact that in their frequent dealings with social and biomedical scientists they have a practical need to evaluate and compare the numerical properties of representative samples.I'm no statistician, but I've often marveled at journalists' inaccuracy when translating (?) statistical data for public consumption -- how are people supposed to gain a statistical sense when the information is presented inaccurately to begin with? Statistics should probably be taught in high school.
I raised the issue of journalists being numeric illiterates, especially on statistics, with Shirley Jihad of WBEZ.
She responded that if she needed to know about statistics she'd call a statistician.
Aaron Freeman, who was also present, supported my point of view that journalists should have a working understanding of statistics so they can understand research and sniff-out when they are being bamboozled.
Thanks for sharing this Carl. Everything in policy (and business too actually) is so data driven these days that it just seems like a no-brainer that you'd need statistics to cover the stories. But I think to be a responsible citizen you should probably have some basic statistics as well...
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