{"id":2725,"date":"2008-07-07T08:44:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-07T08:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/07\/innumeracy-by-john-allen-paulo\/"},"modified":"2008-07-07T08:44:48","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T08:44:48","slug":"innumeracy-by-john-allen-paulo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/07\/innumeracy-by-john-allen-paulo\/","title":{"rendered":"Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen Paulos’s Innumeracy<\/cite> is one of those classics of the field that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I’ve been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I probably would’ve been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics<\/cite>, and the recent The Drunkard’s Walk<\/cite><\/a> by Leonard Mlodinow, and a bunch of other books and articles.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to beat Paulos’s description of the core problem, though:<\/p>\n

\n

Innumeracy, an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens. The same people who cringe when words such as “imply” and “infer” are confused react without a trace of embarrassment to even the most egregious of numerical solecisms. I remember once listening to someone at a party drone on about the difference between “continually” and “continuously.” Later that evening we were watching the news, and the TV weathercaster announced that there was a 50 percent chance of rain for Saturday and a 50 percent chance for Sunday, and concluded that there was therefore a 100 percent chance of rain that weekend. The remark went right by the self-styled grammarian, and even after I explained the mistake to him, he wasn’t nearly as indignant as he would have been had the weathercaster left a dangling participle. In fact, unlike other failing which are hidden, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted: “I can’t even balance my checkbook.” “I’m a people person, not a numbers person.” Or “I always hated math.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Paulos clearly and concisely identifies all the major sources of innumeracy in dealing with probability and statistics, excessive personalization and a kind of misplaced romanticism chief among them. He doesn’t go into as much detail as some other treatments of the subject, opting for a more typically terse mathematician’s approach, but there’s a sort of spare elegance to his presentation.<\/p>\n

I would’ve liked to see more documentation of the problems of innumeracy– how many people have a functional grasp of numbers, what are the policy consequences, what are the solutions that might be attempted– but that’s sort of ahistorical, based on reading other treatments of the same mathematical issues recently. I’d still like some good numbers on the subject, if anyone knows a source.<\/p>\n

The other striking thing about this book is how little has changed. This was written when Reagan was President, and yet the concrete examples he gives still apply perfectly well. Despite twenty-odd years of people pointing to the problem, nothing has gotten any better. Of course, it’s not clear that things have gotten any worse<\/strong>, so there’s that to cling to at least…<\/p>\n

If you’ve read other books on the subject recently, you’ve probably already seen all the examples he uses covered in greater detail. If you haven’t read about the problems of mathematical illiteracy before, though, you won’t find a more concise and readable outline of the basic problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen Paulos’s Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I’ve been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read. Unfortunately, I… Continue reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,53,18,9,37,11,52,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-booklog","category-books","category-math","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-science_books","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}