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Comment by JoelMcCracken | Hacker News Reader

Not enough people understand this. It blew my mind when I first learned about illiteracy rates among Americans. And once you understand innumeracy you begin to understand just how vulnerable people are to coercion. And how people think that 1% fatality rates are no big deal.

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The illiteracy rate in the US is really quite incredible, with the federal government reporting something like 20% of the population to be "low literacy"

https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

Wow - I really thought the first gp in this thread must be wrong, and then researched the UK and we are similar - around 20 to 25 percent. Blows my mind - it appears the levels haven't changed much since the 40s in the UK - which shocked me.

Are there many people who think 1% fatality rate is no big deal? I haven't seen many. But of course the illiterate would not be commenting much online.

There are many who don't think COVID is a big deal, because it doesn't have anywhere close to a 1% fatality rate. But that's not quite the same thing.

Yes, I was referring to covid, but just an example. Initially experts thought thought 1% was correct for covid, AND people thought it was not a big deal.

Thankfully there have been reports that make us think the fatality rate is much less than 1%, but that doesn't change the fact that people though 1% was a tiny number.

I mean, 0.01 is objectively a tiny number. The problem is when you multiply by 328 million ;)

Hence the need for numeracy. You need to be able to do a little bit of thinking for any given number, the context, etc. For example, think about all the people you know, and also how that 0.01 might not be a random sampling of the entire population, but "cluster" in certain cohorts like the elderly, and consider that 0.01 is the worst-case outcome, but in many situations more will still have really bad consequences.

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