alt Hacker NewsMore than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
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I was having a conversation with my dad about how if a virus had a 10% death rate it would be terrifying.
His reply was that 10% was nothing, that means you've got 90% chance to survive. Then said you've probably got a 10% chance of being hit by a bus every time you cross the road. Just absolutely no idea what probabilities are at all or ability to extrapolate probabilities from real world lived experience.
I'd say in reality it's way more than that. The first statistics course in uni was a very humbling experience. I realised that while I thought I understood a lot (and I was coming from a CS heavy background, olympiads and such) real statistics is way harder and a lot more counterintuitive than I thought. Granted, this talks about "basic" statistical understanding, but even that is way more complicated than most people assume.
This is also a political problem. Most of the debates about racism for instance are between people who are illiterate in term of basic statistics, on both sides of the debate. They take extreme tails of distributions as benchmarks, think in term of stereotypes rather than distributions, infer rules from a handful of samples, etc. It makes the whole exercise sterile.
It is not just journalists and politicians that are guilty of that. I see that from many academics who should know better, particularly in humanities departments.
One of the simplest ways to measure risk in stocks, bonds, crypto, mfs etc for ordinary people is Maximum Drawdown. Once you understand how it works, it takes the stress out of making and managing your own portfolio P — espexially your non retirement account. The question you have to ask your self is: "Given some portfolio with returns of X%, am I ok with this asset being down by Z% over T years — i.e the _computed/inferred_ drawdown?" If the answer on one end is no I cannot afford P to have any drawdown at all, then just put your money in a cash/MMF and call it a day. Generally people are ok with some risk on some percent of P and stash the rest in cash, and you _risk adjust_ for Z and T. The portfolio choices are surprisingly simple.
No other question matters. There are some risks but the key element is the understanding of the statistical variance because that allows me to say that "ok 50% of P can afford to be down for 3 years and I won't be homeless".
Most people don't know this but most money managers(managing money for ordinary Americans) that you hire compute this number _once_ and make tiny adjustments to your portfolio(I am talking once a year maybe) and take 1-2%.
I follow this guy called Dave Stein who has a B2C product called money for the rest of us that taught me this. I am not affiliated with them in any way.
“Fortunately, concepts in statistics are grounded in intuition and rationality.“
Yeaaah… let’s talk about that.
Seems like a fair bit of stats were designed to intimidate —so as to get people to stop asking questions. Or at least that is the effect!
Stats designed for intuition are few. See Kill Math for how it might be done: https://worrydream.com/KillMath/
How correlated is the lack of understanding with anti-intellectual views? A lot of people aren't even curious in my experience.
I love how they include statistics in the headline of a story about the lack of understanding of statistics. Epic troll.
100% of headlines of statistics-related articles must follow this rule.
Everyone is hating on statistics, yet HN posts studies all the time.
Yes, stats can be used deceptively or incompetently used, but they are generally useful. You just have to look at the full study to see what the starting data was and all the actions taken on it. Then you have to make a judgements call on if/how you want to apply that to your own choices, political policies, etc.
A great example of a stats being used by two sides of an argument and political positions would be gun control. See Everytown Research and Crime Prevention Reseach Center. You can see what gets measured, included, excluded, etc by each side and how those results get fitted for support of political policy.
There is the old joke that 87 percent of all statistics is made up on the spot. I’ve told it many times but a fair amount of people seemed to believe it hook, line, and sinker.
Even leaving aside the quantitative stuff (p-values, medians, whatever) and can't crunch the math, IMHO at least you should have seen how statistics can lead you to the exact opposite conclusion from reality, so that you at least know whether to think twice about a conclusion drawn from statistics thrown at you. Yet I was recently quite surprised to learn that even many folks in tech had never encountered Simpson's paradox before. All it takes to start explaining that is a scatterplot and a few lines, and yet it doesn't seem to be taught widely. It's rather terrifying, given that most people (myself often included) will be happy to believe "obvious" conclusions drawn from seeing one percentage greatly exceed another.
Eloquently embodied by the late misfit troubadour and grunge philosopher Todd Snider in Statistician's Blues
This was abundantly clear when people, even on HN, were upset about the bureau of labor statistics revising their numbers tendentially downwards, probably confusing the notion of statistical bias for that of political bias.
If the figures are biased, just estimate the bias and correct for that, what is the big deal they said, as if the bias variance tradeoff was not a thing.
And even the headline gets it wrong. They asked 1,000 people, over half of whom say they lacked basic statistical understanding.
The first question was: “How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?”
not probability, p-values.
I had to look up p-values to check it meant what I thought it did to avoid making a fool of myself in this comment. I knew I was probably right, but possibly wrong.
The same goes for my assumption that this survey was engineered to deliver a bad result. Why? because it makes it easier to get funding for a the author's solution to the problem. Again, probably right, possibly wrong.
Statistics, like math, is a language, first learn the vocabulary, then you can judge the meaning
That's so obvious when the answer to "X per capita" is usually "but the US is so big"
That headline is pretty generous... 62% is quite a bit more than half. It's actually more than 3/5. I'd even go so far to say it's nearly two thirds.
That’s surprisingly self-aware, and encouraging.
Makes me wonder what the numbers are like in other countries. There's a lot of talk here about issues with the American education system and what not, but I suspect the numbers would be about the same in many other places too.
Like, if I asked the average person here in the UK what a p-value was, I suspect the majority either wouldn't know or would have barely heard of the idea. I suspect those numbers wouldn't change much in other countries, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or South America.
Basic statistics and basic economics/finance are two subjects that are completely underdeveloped within the general population. Coincidentally those two effectively rule our entire lives. As an aside, STAT 200 looks like a solid stats course.
A coarse understanding like "the smaller p-value is the more likely a headline is true" is worse than no understanding at all. I bet most people who believed they understood what p-value is are like that though.
I would estimate that 90% of software developers I have spoken to lack basic statistical understanding. Basic concepts like kurtosis, skewness, moments, the core Greeks all seem to be alien concepts to most.
> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?
I suspect that it’s far far less than 38% of people who actually understand statistics to this level. I suspect if someone on HN went around and asked their co workers to explain what a P value is in 2 sentences, it would be less than 10% of a (presumably) highly educated workforce.
I suspect about 40% of adults are unable to tell the difference between mean/median/ mode, or could answer the Monty hall problem, or even “if I flip a coin 3 times are the chances I get heads 3 times in a row”
We already know the pre-university US education system is bad (comparatively with other OECD countries), particularly in Mathematics.
No surprise here.
I would be more likely to believe the results if they tested these adults and not asked them.
There's a big ego hit in admitting you don't know something. And many people are brought up thinking that it's a shame not to know something and that someone is better for knowing something. Like, a better person, not just better in some field.
The fact that 62% of Americans have little or no understanding of statistics may be related to those 40% of Americans that believe in Creationism, i.e. human (and fossils) were created by God a few thousands of years ago, and not of randomness and evolution over millions of years. I think no other industrial country has that disbelief in science. https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
This problem with science is apparent in another survey: in 2009, a Pew Center publication showed that 33% of scientists in the USA believed in God (and 18% in a transient power), which is much lower than the 80% belief of the general American population at the time. Of course, this is not a proof of causality in either direction, but scientific knowledge is seemingly inversely correlated to religiosity. And the USA are still more religious than any other industrial more-or-less-democratic country.
> More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
So, when surveyed, they tell they are in the other half than they really are?
I would be surprised if a significant number of people anywhere had a basic statistical understanding. It is a difficult topic.
these are the self-aware ones. I worked with and trained hundreds of scientists; I would say 95% of them had at best a shaky understanding of basic probability and statistical concepts!!
Basic statistical?
I have seen too many parents (i am a teacher) lacking basic mathematical and geometrical understanding.
Let alone, statistics.
Schooling is broken, society is rotting, culture is dead.
Been saying it for years. Basic probability theory should be taught in schools, it's a strong tool for understanding the world around you.
Reminds me a joke by Robert Anton Wilson:
"You know how dumb an average American is. Well, mathematically speaking, half of them are even dumber than that."
> The survey showed that 62% of U.S. adults self-report having little to no idea what statistics or statistical concepts like p-values are, but 90% of them would base decisions on reported statistics at least sometimes if they understood them better.
You're kidding, right? 38% self-report more than that? If their self-report were accurate it would imply an education system that has truly excelled.
Well, that's what happens when you use words like math and not maths. Although us Brits aren't that much better.
What does it really mean to properly understand p-value? What I remember is that if the p-value is less than 0.05, the research result is considered statistically significant. That's about as far as my memory goes. I know that's actually a misunderstanding, but that's how most people understand it. I'm not sure how much I need to know to say I truly understand it.
The question asked as part of the survey: “how well do you understand p-values?” Most scientists may not even be able to pass truthfully.
I was briefly excited that people were aware they lacked the understanding.
> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?
Is that a well designed survey question?
I would expect the use of a specific jargon term in that question to affect the results in a significant way.
How is that in China?
38% of Americans say they have some familiarity with statistics.
On a somewhat related note, 8% of Americans say they can beat a gorilla in a fist-fight.
What's going on in Pennsylvania? Is it so highly educated a place that they don't understand that 50% of U.S. adults can't read at a 6th grade level, let alone understand "confidence intervals"?
not all U.S adults lack statistical understanding!
Maybe their survey should have asked one question: What is the difference between average and median?
More than half would not be able to answer this, and not only in US.
that's about 70%!
Stats is one of those subjects which displays the dunning kruger effect really well.
Sure on the surface stuffile averages, medians, standard deviations etc are quite easy but the moment you start going deeper you realize how difficult and un-intuitive things start to get.
I'm still in the valley of despair, and frankly it's probably the best place to be in for the average person. Understand the basics and know just enough to realize how easy it is to mislead people with it.
[delayed]
Ratan
>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge
The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation)
I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0.
Indeed, statistically, no-one has a clue how statistics work.
I did however learn enough to know that statistics can tell you absolutely anything you want them to say. Assuming you don't just make them up, they're trivial to manipulate to generate the headline you want.
When used to evaluate risk, the comprehension goes down further (a fact willfully exploited my any decent marketing.)
Statistically, most statistics are meaningless.