Bruce Schneier on Mathematical Illiteracy | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Schneier on Mathematical Illiteracy

schneier.com

35 pointsbillswift14 comments

This blog post provides almost no content; all it does it point out a Daily Show sketch about mathematical illiteracy. The bizarre 50% fallacy in that sketch was the punch line; the idea was, that fallacy was so retarded that just mentioning it, without explanation or retort, would be funny to most of The Daily Show's audience.

What you don't see is that the person in question is a HS science teacher.

You saw that if you watched the actual episode, where that fact was another punch line.

Surely the word is 'innumeracy', not the phrase 'mathematical illiteracy'?

My goof, sorry. [EDIT: I thought I had mistyped the title, but I just checked his site to see if he'd posted anything new, and found I had got it right the first time]

Your goof? That's the title of the post. I would have kept it as such also.

"In related news, almost four-fifths of Americans don't know that a trillion is a million million, and most think it's less than that. Is it any wonder why we're having so much trouble with national budget debates?"

No wonder at all. Especially if people think money from the government is free money.

Maybe news outlets ought to list numbers in scientific notation a la 1e6 instead of million and 1e12 instead of a trillion. That way you can just add the exponents without all that pesky multiplication and division.

But we'll need to change the name to something different from "scientific notation." It sounds way too sciency to be palatable. My money is on EZ-Numero.

I don't know if that would really help. The problem with numbers above "million" is that people tend to think that a billion is a few million. Changing to a notation where the exponents are just numbers won't help. They know what 12 and 6 are, so E12 is like, twice as big as E6.

I think the solution is to go Carl Sagan: start saying "million million" instead of trillion.

I wonder if the other fifth is just British expats who still think a trillion is a million cubed.

This is more of a hrair problem. Most people have never knowingly encountered a million of anything at once (though of course everyone unknowingly encounters far more atoms than that all the time), but they can extrapolate that far. Taking a million of a million of something just requires a bit more extrapolation than someone not used to working with numbers can do automatically.

People do usually understand these things when put in terms of things they have encountered. Say that a million seconds is about 11.5 days, that a billion seconds is about 31.7 years, and that a trillion seconds is about 31.7 milennia. Most people will at least see the first distinction, and at least have some notion of the second.

Remember that guff about, "This DNA test is supposed to be correct, all but 1 in 50 billion cases, but this is meaningless, because there are less than 10 billion people on the planet."

Arrrrgh! Sometimes I think maybe we could do with some "illiterocide."

It's be simpler, and more humane, just to not let them breed and vote.

It is difficult to "feel" large numbers if one is not used to playing them without calculator. It seems that accuracy beyond three digits is an interesting phenomenon, e.g. 5.2 million is easier to comprehend than 5,263,921. Consequently, more effort is needed to imagine bigger magnitudes from million, billion, trillion and so on.

I'm curious to know if there is a correlation between eidetic memory and ability to visualize huge numbers.

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