The reason you drill math in school is to be able to do it effortlessly and intuitively. It shows up absolutely everywhere in our lives, but people without a ma

The reason you drill math in school is to be able to do it effortlessly and intuitively. It shows up absolutely everywhere in our lives, but people without a mathematical intuition would be largely blind to it. One of the most common examples of this is in probability. People are expected to make very important decisions on these things, but without any understanding of what it means. For instance imagine something claims to make something bad 90% less likely to happen. People without a mathematical intuition would probably think that means means something goes from being pretty likely to happen to being very unlikely to happen. Of course it means nothing of the sort. Something that is 0.000001% to 0.0000001% is a 90% reduction in probability, but you've gone from absurdly unlikely to absurdly unlikely - for a negligible practical effect. Or vice versa, if you're investing and think some event is only 2% likely to happen, then many would simply discard it. While failing to consider that such black swan events are arguably the single most important factors in finance. Because you earning a small amount 98% of the time and losing it all 2% of the time, then that means you're going to lose it all on any significant timeframe. See: "hedge" funds continuing to rip off the mathematically naive relative to index funds (which themselves may even provide insufficient security given contemporary issues). Another would be something like the gambler's fallacy. You're at a roulette wheel and see it's turned up red 17 times in a row. Surely the odds of a black are now way better than 50%, right!?!? Of course not. Such logic is most easily demonstrated with gambling, but it shows up everywhere in real life as well in any field with randomness. For basic mathematics consider something like fertility rates. For those with a strong mathematical intuition fertility rates are absolutely terrifying. For those without such, a fertility rate of 1 and 2 seem pretty much the same - so what's the big deal? And so on endlessly. Going through life without a mathematical intuition is entirely possible, as most people lack such. But it's akin to going through life colorblind. You simply aren't seeing things that others do, and ideally schools would work to prevent that so much as possible.