Sunday, January 23, 2005
The NY Times "public editor" has a piece on innumeracy (here's another article referred to by the first). Lots of good points. People just don't understand numbers. When people aren't given a context, they need to know how to find the appropriate one. That people don't know how to do this makes it it easy to manipulate them. It's like thermometers that measure to the tenth of a degree. People think, surely if they have that level of precision, it must be accurate, and it must reflect a qualitative difference between different measurements. On the scales we're talking about, they're not usually that accurate. Even if they are, they aren't necessarily meaningful. Numbers can be invented just as easily as any other assertion and, with the patina of credibility they give, are probably even more invented than other assertions. Of course, people aren't so good at questioning those other kinds of assertions either, but that's for another day.