

Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times - michael_dorfman
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/shameful_innumeracy_in_the_new.php

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ryanwaggoner
I actually kind of enjoyed watching this guy spin himself into a frenzy and
conclude that the NYT editors have no basic understanding of anything, based
solely on what could have easily just been a typo. Some people really have too
much time on their hands.

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steveitis
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?

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Isn't your response to the comment (and my response to yours) guilty of the
same fault?

If we keep going like this, we'll meta ourselves up a black hole or something.

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jongraehl
The fault of hypocrisy? No.

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Eliezer
As a teenager, I had an almost exactly similar conversation to this with a
_line editor of the GED_ (after looking at a "sample question" on the official
GED website). I exchanged a couple of emails and I'm pretty sure she flatly
did not understand the concept of a percentile.

Yes, I'm sure that she was the problem and not me. I ran it past my father, a
Ph.D. physicist, and he couldn't figure out how to attach a sane
interpretation to her remarks either.

~~~
camccann
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.

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FreeRadical
comment #6 on the blog said

"Some well established federal organizations (ie, NIH) do percentiles
backwards. That is, 85 percentile score better than 15%. Maybe that's what's
going on...."

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jacobolus
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...](http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/hypertension/child_tbl.pdf)

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...](http://www.med.nyu.edu/spa/education/PaylinesDescription.html)

My guess is that the commenter was mistaken.

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RyanMcGreal
> I just never quite manage to absorb how clueless the average person is.

Gawrsh, I'm shore glad we have these here science bloggers to help drag us
clueless folks out of the mud.

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camccann
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).

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newsio
The author is the same person who wrote the much-commented scienceblogs post
about why he won't go to his high school reunion. The post and the comments
are well worth reading, if you haven't seen them before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709733>

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InclinedPlane
Half of all low-income students have below average test scores! We need new
laws, new taxes, and new government initiatives to fix this problem!

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

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

~~~
InclinedPlane
There are 3 different measures of "average", just choose average = median and
you're set.

