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It’s wild to me how prevalent and yet how poorly understood dyscalculia is. It’s around 6% in the Caucasian population, which pretty much guarantees one kid has
by lemming 3y ago
It’s wild to me how prevalent and yet how poorly understood dyscalculia is. It’s around 6% in the Caucasian population, which pretty much guarantees one kid has it in every classroom. And yet, there’s very little good info on what actually works when teaching affected kids (source: my daughter has it), especially compared to the enormous well oiled machine that swings into action when a kid is diagnosed with dyslexia. I get that dyslexia is worse because you have to be able to read to learn anything, but it’s frustrating.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> It’s around 6% in the Caucasian population, which pretty much guarantees one kid has it in every classroom. That wouldn't be true even if children were randomly assigned to classrooms. > I get that dyslexia is worse because you have to be able to read to learn anything That... also doesn't come close to being true.
- Izkata 3y ago6% is about 1 in 17. Classrooms where I grew up had 20-30 kids.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoSo under the assumption that children are randomly assigned to classrooms, 70% of 20-kid classrooms will have at least one student drawn from the 6% pool, and 30% won't. That's a "guarantee"?
- Izkata 3y agoThey said "pretty much guarantees". With those numbers, yes, that idiom is pretty much accurate. It's not the same thing as "guarantees" alone.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoWith those numbers, yes, that idiom is pretty much accurate. About as accurate as saying that "if you see two children, it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not both girls". That's not something that anyone would accept as accurate.
- Izkata 3y agoRight, half is not "pretty much". Its meaning is more like "mostly", that's why it fits the above. It's something like, that situation is common enough it should be your base assumption when talking theoreticals. For example, if you have 9 boys and 1 girl in a room, and pick one at random, you're not guaranteed to get a boy, but you're pretty much guaranteed to get a boy. It's a wishy-washy way of saying the most likely outcome by a decent margin.
- noaccountusueh 3y agoThe post you replied to said “they're not both girls”. That’s 75% not half. Weirdly though, “it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not both girls” sounds unacceptable to me, but “it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them is a boy” sounds ok-ish, even though they’re equivalent.
- Nevermark 3y ago“Big” and “small” shift their meaning in context in ways we are aware of, and not aware of. Things like “almost always”, “nearly guaranteed”, “effectively never” also adjust their meaning relative to context in ways we are not aware of. There isn’t a solution to different people having different instincts about these numbers, except being aware of the issue, and not trying to project one person’s intuitions as being the “right” intuitions.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoI strongly suspect that what's going on here is not that a bunch of commenters are happy to agree with statements like "in craps, you're pretty much guaranteed not to roll 7" or "when you hit in blackjack, you're pretty much guaranteed not to get a face card". Rather, they're making the statements they do because they feel that 17 one-in-seventeen chances must add up to one 100% chance, or because they can't tell the difference between 50% and 75%, and they don't feel like checking to see whether the things they're saying make any sense.
- callalex 3y agoYea, pretty much.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]