

Bruce Schneier on Mathematical Illiteracy - billswift
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/mathematical_il.html

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tptacek
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.

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Alex3917
What you don't see is that the person in question is a HS science teacher.

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

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

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billswift
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]

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

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tokenadult
"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.

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mustpax
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.

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ianferrel
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.

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stcredzero
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."

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

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khandekars
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.

