Mathematics
With the memetics discussion that has been going around the blog world, I have been able to more easily find blogs of interest to me. Follow the meme trail. My blogroll is growing!
An interesting post was put on No More Hornets. The Exterminator made a post yesterday called Democrazy. Fairly clever, but the rant was decent. I don’t want to discuss all of it; I only wish to pull out one topic.
Math
Admitted: You can lie with statistics. But you can’t make two plus two equal five, regardless of what We the Innumerate People want. For instance: If the figures overwhelmingly show that abstinence education doesn’t work to stop teenage pregnancies, a voice vote — even led by the loudest, most pious throats in the country — won’t alter the calculations. Those girls are carrying real, countable babies. Get out your abacuses, fundies, you’ve got some adding to do.
I’ll throw out my two cents on this. My domain is based on my math background. I studied math and minored in statistics. I thought once of pursuing post-grad studies in statistics, but I ran out of money. A university education is expensive!
Studying math and statistics taught me a ton, and I worked to make it practical. Never play the lottery was one thing I figured out. Poor man’s tax is right. We live in a world of gamblers, and I don’t think that most of the gamblers truly understand the odds.
Anyway, one thing that has always driven me nuts, and the above post clarifies this, is when people say statistics lie. No. Statistics are used to lie. People use to dismiss my field of study by saying that it is a load of crap. That statisticians can say whatever they want and it is true enough. Not so. Statistics are a tool and a form of measurement.
The key is education. We dismiss math and statistics at a very young age in America. That is why I used to get the responses I did. If we make subjects boring, then people won’t care enough about it to educate themselves further. Same thing we do with politics.
Every time I see survey results on television, I question it. I look for the source (or who financed the survey), I look for sample error (the higher the error, the smaller the sample size, the less accurate the results), and any other indicators that the results may have been used to prove a point rather than answer a question.
A good statistician seeks answer to questions, and does not set out to prove a specific point.
We do a poor job in this country of getting fundamentals across. People are taught how to do things, but not what to do with it. There was a show that was on when I was a teenager. Some movie where a woman goes back to her high school years through some time travel out of body thing. I know, that story has been done hundreds of times.
What got me was when the woman turned girl was in Algebra class and raised her hand to let the teacher and class know that none of them will ever have a need for algebra again, because she knew from experience. Somebody had to believe that in order to put that in a movie. I figure many people believe it. Algebra gets used daily by people; they just don’t realize it. It’s fundamental to our existence on society.
Long winded I know. It’s simple. I ranted about the poor use of the English language the other day, and now I’m ranting about how people do not understand math. Math is vital to us being responsible citizens and being able to make important choices on our own. Statistics are only numbers. Read them correctly and they can be the greatest tool we have.
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Nice post. I think anyone who even mentions surveys, polls, or “public opinion” in their political discourse ought to be urged to read that old chestnut How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff. Even though that book is more than 50 years old, it should still be required reading in high school math classes.
Thanks. And I haven’t read that book.
I will jot it down and find it.