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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

The average person (vax or anti-vax) will read this to the end, maybe even understand the numbers but then think "well, but half of COVID deaths are among the vaccinated". 90% of people know that Stats is the hardest math there is and the other 15% don't get it.

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Not knowing statistics is a form of protection against depression, sadness and anxiety.

Gotta thank god that the majority of people believe bad stuff doesn't apply to them.

It's a burden for few.

If you want to see society collapse just improve the literacy in statistics

Correct. The famous saying that "ignorance is bliss" is what comes to mind here.

> Not knowing statistics is a form of protection against depression, sadness and anxiety.

Hrm, I'd have thought the opposite. A lot of the things that many people spend a lot of time worrying about are really vanishingly unlikely.

Unlikely thing causing no damage is no source of concern

unlikely things which cause tremendous damage are for sure cause of concern because it only needs to happen once and it’s game over for the person/group/entity which find themselves at the receiving end of that

These days you can't rely even on scientists to interpret results correctly. I see interpretation problems almost every other paper I read that has any non trivial research that involves statistics.

Vast majority of people are functional illiterates when it comes to statistics. How you present statistics is more important than what the data actually says.

Fun fact, you probably never could rely on scientists to interpret results correctly.

This is absolutely correct; look up Feynman's parable about the oil drop experiment, for example.

>90% of people know that Stats is the hardest math there is and the other 15% don't get it.

I feel like this is a joke that I'm not understanding?

Yeah, sorry, doesn't add up to 100, that's the whole joke.

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