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Comment by shrubby | Hacker News Reader

I started thinking about this percentage on decision makers around the world and got a chuckle.

I've been trying to talk about the median vs. mean with a bunch of politicians on themes around the zillionaires, wealth or consumption and for most parts they're clueless. Or the ones with degrees still go with the normal (mean that skews the normal) as they're afraid.

I just happened to get a copy of naked statistics yesterday, as I feel the human traits of poor comprehension of probabilities can be enhanced to at least some extent. And my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

If there are better entry-level books on the matter I'm happy to take some recommendations.

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Related, this result on statistics comprehension is another stepping stone on my path away from believing in technocracy - a journey I’ve been on for the past 10 years and have felt more passionately about over the past 2 years.

I was recently convinced by a rather compelling argument that technocracy (rule by the technically capable) often falls to a local minima where the people in power find the first scrap of evidence that supports their preconceived agenda. Wildly racist? Natural selection “proves” that all of your decisions are “technically” justified.

But more directly to your point about being effective communicators of statistics, I’ve found that it’s difficult to help someone form their own conclusion from statistical results. Most people want the conclusion fed to them, with the statistics supplied as evidence. It’s up to us (proper statisticians) to act ethically: provide analyses in good faith and challenge the poorly conceived analyses of amateurs and statisticians acting in bad faith.

> my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

That's bonkers. Society is all about statistics, and the reverse. Without statistics any kind of social studies is only Just So stories.

> And my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

In the university I went to, Department of Statistics used to be part of the Faculty of Social Sciences. It was impossible to graduate from social sciences without taking a few classes of statistics. Then in some reorganization, Department of Statistics merged with Department of Mathematics. Except that old-school statisticians didn't want to move to the Faculty of Science, and they somehow managed to keep their offices in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

I'm a bachelor of social services and healthcare from applied side so if statistics we're mentioned they must've been in the small print.

And I took some math in university before dropping out of CSC decades ago, so it isn't too hard, but my hunch is that with the BSs students the statistics in decent level would've been too much anyway.

Dunno really.

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