Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times

You posted a comment about your enjoyment of the authors failure, and judged his time management skills due to the fact that he posted his rant about another persons failure on the internet.

Do you not see the hypocrisy?

Especially considering his evidence is limited to one short article in the opinion section.

Sure, it could have been a typo, or some other minor mistake.

But he's also correct that it's hilariously wrong. Is it really asking too much that something published in the New York Times either have sufficient editing and proofreading to not make an embarrassing typo, or refrain from using terms they don't understand the meaning of, whichever the case may be?

Even if it's only an editorial, it undermines confidence in the paper as a whole. How often do they make similarly silly mistakes on things where I don't know better?

Speaking from personal experience, understanding the concept of much of anything is, alas, not really required to pass the GED. So I fear that anyone who can comprehend an advanced concept such as "percentiles" would be wasting their talents on anything involving the GED.

I’d really like to see a better explanation of that, or some evidence. It’s possible to order things from “best” to “worst”, with the bottom one percent being the best, but there’s really no way to interpret “below the 85th percentile” as anything other than “among the bottom 85%” without some special, personal, opposites-day definition of “percentile”.

To show that at least some at the NIH have a perfectly reasonable understanding of percentiles, here’s a chart of boy’s blood pressure by height percentile: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/hypertension/child_tbl.p...

The NIH’s percentile scoring system for grant applications certainly knows the proper meaning of “percentile”: http://www.med.nyu.edu/spa/education/PaylinesDescription.htm...

My guess is that the commenter was mistaken.

Reality check: The median regular poster on HN is probably in the 95th percentile or better for intelligence, knowledge, and general cluefulness. Hell, the median poster on slashdot is probably well above average.

The bloggers on ScienceBlogs are, in general, competent, intelligent, and well-educated. A faux-folksy disdain for competence plays well for the masses, but politically correct or not there is such thing as actual expertise and I don't know why you're insulting someone for pointing out that a large majority of people are completely unequipped to discuss anything involving even very basic statistics (or any other practical math).

So we could spend all the money and happily report that as a result of huge investments in education half of all low-income students now have above average test scores - a great improvement indeed!

Be careful about distributions; not everything's a bell curve.

Consider: 99% of Americans own a below-average number of houseboats.