this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
121 points (96.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43472 readers
1769 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Basic arithmetic to the point where you can e.g. calculate things like a budget when money is tight.
Enough understanding of statistics and probability to be able to understand what numbers reported in news stories about events and politics mean.
They never tell you enough on the statistics on the news to actually get much solid info. Like sample size, error bars, did they fit a particular distribution, what was tossed as outliers and more.
I always think about the chance of rain report and the different explanations of what it might mean (I don't recall which is correct, but it illustrates how confusing it can be) :
Chance of rain today based on a predictive model
Is different from
It WILL rain today in this region and this percent of land area will get rain
Is different from
Over all the historical data for this region, we got rain on this percent of days when the conditions were "the same" in the past.
But all can be reasonably said to be 59% chance of rain today.
Agreed. But part of the reason why they never report the numbers is that most of the readers don't understand them anyway.
And a lot of the time it is not even just complex studies people don't understand. There are also those who can't even judge the magnitude of numbers, e.g. when it comes to spending or the magnitude of percentages (e.g. that 25000 occurrences of a minor crime in a year is not a lot if the country has dozens of millions of inhabitants)
Part of the problem I think is the difference between a basic skill level skill that you imagine "everyone" could actually learn - maybe like tying your shoes - and skills like statistics where I might be slightly better than the average person, having taken one college class in statistics and doing occasional reading and podcast listening. Statistics requires at least some college level study to even begin to understand IMHO. I don't mean you have to go to college, but I mean that level of foundational skills built up, and the time and effort to reach it.
I'd prefer if news reports - a place where you can expect some ability to employ experts - to provide context around things like you're saying. Otherwise I get why people are ditching "news" beyond maybe Reuters. It would be pretty easy to say exactly what you did, but that doesn't get the clicks so... we have entertainment more than news.
It does vary from place to place but in North America at least, most often it's that it will rain in __% of the land area.
Additionally, I would add that knowing about statistics at least allows you to understand that without that additional info, any stat is essentially meaningless, or at least easily misleading.
That is true, I just think it might be hard for many people to understand.