6 ms·

I know you're coming from a good place, but the 'most people I meet don't understand this' line about statistics is quite arrogant. Most people you meet are ful

by tomlue 2y ago

I know you're coming from a good place, but the 'most people I meet don't understand this' line about statistics is quite arrogant. Most people you meet are fully capable of understanding statistics; you should do a better job of explaining it when it comes up, or maybe you are the one who misunderstands. After all, most statisticians thought Marilyn vos Savant was wrong about the goats too...

robwwilliams 2y ago
Not my experience at all. Just one example: try talking to physicians about false discovery rates; even those who do not profit from state-of-the art screening methods. Incorporating Bayesian methods is even a struggle for statisticians. It is a stuggle for me. John Ioannidis has much to say on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis
joebob42 2y ago
My experience is that most people don't understand statistics and can be pretty easily mislead. That includes myself, with my only defense being that I'm at least aware statistics don't intuitively make sense and either ignore arguments based on them or if absolutely necessary invest the extra time to properly understand. Most people either don't realize this is necessary or don't have the background to do it even if they did, in my experience.
lordnacho 2y ago
You don't have to be on the internet for long to see: - "Polls are useless, they only sampled a few thousand people" - "Why do we need the crime figures adjusted for the age/income/etc groups? Just gimme the raw truth!" Have to say, I think stats are the least well taught area in the math curriculum. Most people by far have no clue what Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes are. Most people do not have the critical sense when presented with stats to ask questions like "how was the data collected" or "does it show what we think it shows". I just don't see it, tough ironically I don't have stats to back it up.
- organsnyder 2y ago
  You don't have to be on the Internet long to see flat-earthers or any number of asinine ways of thinking. You can't stretch discrete observations from a supremely massive sample size into "most people".
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Gee, if only there was some kind of rigorous and well understood process for determining how to transform discrete observations according to how representative they are, such that we could build a model for a larger population. Something like that would be very useful for political decision, so perhaps we could name it after the latin word for "of the state"… ;P
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > perhaps we could name it after the latin word for "of the state"… Civitatis?
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Alterum verbum est https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/statistics#Etymology_1 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/statistics#Etymology_1
        thaumasiotes 2y ago
        That's not Latin. > from New Latin statisticum Also, etymonline makes a pretty convincing case that statisticum refers to the behavior of administrators, not to the concept of the administration, with the -ist- specifically indicating a person.
pessimizer 2y ago
This is not at all true, and I think it's an example of what statisticians have to fight against in order to explain anything. Most people have an almost religious belief that inferences drawn from statistics should be intuitive, when they are often often extremely counterintuitive. > After all, most statisticians thought Marilyn vos Savant was wrong about the goats too... This is the opposite of the argument that you're making. Here you're saying that probability is so confusing and counterintuitive that even the experts get it wrong.
- tomlue 2y ago
  My point was that the experts were blinded by arrogance. Even back then most ( almost all? ) statisticians were capable of understanding the monte hall problem. Yet they just assumed that a woman was wrong when she explained something that didn’t match their intuition. Instead of stopping to think, they let their arrogance take over and just assumed they were right.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kqr 2y ago
It's definitely arrogant. But after much experience trying to explain these things to people, I'm more and more convinced it's not just "if you just put it the right way they will understand". Sure, they will nod politely and pretend to understand, and may even do a passable job of reciting it, but once its cast in a slightly different light they are just as confused. Much as with reading and writing, I think it takes an active imagination and a long slog of unlearning to trust logic (the "ought to" thinking that shields one from reality) and coming to terms with the race not being to the swift, etc, and that these effects can be quantified. It's not that some people are incapable of it. Much like literal literacy has reached rates of 99.9 % in parts of the world, I'm convinced statistical literacy can too. But when your teacher is not statistically literate (which I hypothesise they are not, generally speaking), they will not pass that on to you. They will not give you examples where the race is not to the swift. They will not point out when things seem to happen within regular variation and when they seem to be due to assignable causes. They will not observe the battle against entropy in seating choices in the classroom. They will not point out potential confounders in propensity associations. They will not treat student performance as a sample from a hypothetical population. They will not grade multiple-choice questions on KL divergence, although that would be far more useful. I could go on but I think you get the point. Yet to be clear, I'm not talking about just applying statistical techniques and tools. I'm talking about being able to follow a basic argument that rests on things like "yes I know they are a fantastic founder but startups fail 90 % of the time and so will they" or "if the ordinary variation between bus arrivals is 5–15 minutes and we have waited 20 minutes then there is something specific that put the bus we are waiting for into a different population." These are not obvious things to many people. This is not a personal failure – it is a lack of role models and teachers. I wouldn't have considered myself statistically literate until recently, and only thanks to accidentally reading the right books. I wouldn't even have known what I was missing were it not for that! I suspect it will take a few generations to really get it going. If someone would donate me large amounts of money I would love to actively research this subject, come up with reliable and valid scales to measure statistical literacy, and so on. But in the meantime I can only think in my spare time and sometimes write about it online.
- shever73 2y ago
  What resources would you recommend for someone who wants to improve their statistical literacy? You mention reading the right books, I'd appreciate it if you could give a short list, if you have time.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
I'm not surprised by the statement 'most people i meet don't understand this'. More than 50 percent of people I meet are less educated. Its statisticly evident. I might be over reaching but in fact what comes across as arrogance is just an example of statistical illiteracy. Most (>> 50 percent of) people are very good at detecting patterns. People are very bad at averaging numbers of events, because the detected patterns stand out so much and are implicitly and unconsciously exaggerated. An example. "in my city people drive like crazy" in fact means: this week i was a lot on the road and i saw 2 out of 500 cars that did not follow the rules and there was even one honking. It 'felt' like crazy traffic but in fact it was not.
michaelmarkell 2y ago
The Monty hall problem is a great example of something I’ve been educated into believing, rationalizing, whatever you want to call it…but I would still never claim I “understand it.” I think that’s maybe the source of disagreement here, there are many truly unintuitive outcomes of statistics that are not “understood” by most people in the most respectful sense of the word, even if we’ve been educated into knowing the formula, knowing how to come to the right answer, etc. It’s like in chess, I know that the Sicilian is a good opening, that I’m supposed to play a6 in the najdorf, but I absolutely do not “understand” the Najdorf, and I do think it’s fundamentally past the limit of most humans understanding.
- tomlue 2y ago
  you should totally spend some time thinking and experimenting with the monty hall problem then. It might not be as tricky as you think.
wisty 2y ago
The vast majority of people are not that great at statistics. Even something as banal as "correlation is not causation, and can often be explained by a common cause" will blow a fair few minds (e.g. telling most people that old chestnut about how the murder rate is correlated with ice cream sales).

by tomlue 2y ago

robwwilliams 2y ago

Not my experience at all. Just one example: try talking to physicians about false discovery rates; even those who do not profit from state-of-the art screening methods. Incorporating Bayesian methods is even a struggle for statisticians. It is a stuggle for me. John Ioannidis has much to say on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis

joebob42 2y ago

My experience is that most people don't understand statistics and can be pretty easily mislead. That includes myself, with my only defense being that I'm at least aware statistics don't intuitively make sense and either ignore arguments based on them or if absolutely necessary invest the extra time to properly understand. Most people either don't realize this is necessary or don't have the background to do it even if they did, in my experience.

lordnacho 2y ago

You don't have to be on the internet for long to see: - "Polls are useless, they only sampled a few thousand people" - "Why do we need the crime figures adjusted for the age/income/etc groups? Just gimme the raw truth!" Have to say, I think stats are the least well taught area in the math curriculum. Most people by far have no clue what Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes are. Most people do not have the critical sense when presented with stats to ask questions like "how was the data collected" or "does it show what we think it shows". I just don't see it, tough ironically I don't have stats to back it up.

organsnyder 2y ago
You don't have to be on the Internet long to see flat-earthers or any number of asinine ways of thinking. You can't stretch discrete observations from a supremely massive sample size into "most people".
- ben_w 2y ago
  Gee, if only there was some kind of rigorous and well understood process for determining how to transform discrete observations according to how representative they are, such that we could build a model for a larger population. Something like that would be very useful for political decision, so perhaps we could name it after the latin word for "of the state"… ;P
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > perhaps we could name it after the latin word for "of the state"… Civitatis?
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Alterum verbum est https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/statistics#Etymology_1 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/statistics#Etymology_1
      - thaumasiotes 2y ago
        That's not Latin. > from New Latin statisticum Also, etymonline makes a pretty convincing case that statisticum refers to the behavior of administrators, not to the concept of the administration, with the -ist- specifically indicating a person.

pessimizer 2y ago

This is not at all true, and I think it's an example of what statisticians have to fight against in order to explain anything. Most people have an almost religious belief that inferences drawn from statistics should be intuitive, when they are often often extremely counterintuitive. > After all, most statisticians thought Marilyn vos Savant was wrong about the goats too... This is the opposite of the argument that you're making. Here you're saying that probability is so confusing and counterintuitive that even the experts get it wrong.

tomlue 2y ago
My point was that the experts were blinded by arrogance. Even back then most ( almost all? ) statisticians were capable of understanding the monte hall problem. Yet they just assumed that a woman was wrong when she explained something that didn’t match their intuition. Instead of stopping to think, they let their arrogance take over and just assumed they were right.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kqr 2y ago

It's definitely arrogant. But after much experience trying to explain these things to people, I'm more and more convinced it's not just "if you just put it the right way they will understand". Sure, they will nod politely and pretend to understand, and may even do a passable job of reciting it, but once its cast in a slightly different light they are just as confused. Much as with reading and writing, I think it takes an active imagination and a long slog of unlearning to trust logic (the "ought to" thinking that shields one from reality) and coming to terms with the race not being to the swift, etc, and that these effects can be quantified. It's not that some people are incapable of it. Much like literal literacy has reached rates of 99.9 % in parts of the world, I'm convinced statistical literacy can too. But when your teacher is not statistically literate (which I hypothesise they are not, generally speaking), they will not pass that on to you. They will not give you examples where the race is not to the swift. They will not point out when things seem to happen within regular variation and when they seem to be due to assignable causes. They will not observe the battle against entropy in seating choices in the classroom. They will not point out potential confounders in propensity associations. They will not treat student performance as a sample from a hypothetical population. They will not grade multiple-choice questions on KL divergence, although that would be far more useful. I could go on but I think you get the point. Yet to be clear, I'm not talking about just applying statistical techniques and tools. I'm talking about being able to follow a basic argument that rests on things like "yes I know they are a fantastic founder but startups fail 90 % of the time and so will they" or "if the ordinary variation between bus arrivals is 5–15 minutes and we have waited 20 minutes then there is something specific that put the bus we are waiting for into a different population." These are not obvious things to many people. This is not a personal failure – it is a lack of role models and teachers. I wouldn't have considered myself statistically literate until recently, and only thanks to accidentally reading the right books. I wouldn't even have known what I was missing were it not for that! I suspect it will take a few generations to really get it going. If someone would donate me large amounts of money I would love to actively research this subject, come up with reliable and valid scales to measure statistical literacy, and so on. But in the meantime I can only think in my spare time and sometimes write about it online.

shever73 2y ago
What resources would you recommend for someone who wants to improve their statistical literacy? You mention reading the right books, I'd appreciate it if you could give a short list, if you have time.

nuancebydefault 2y ago

I'm not surprised by the statement 'most people i meet don't understand this'. More than 50 percent of people I meet are less educated. Its statisticly evident. I might be over reaching but in fact what comes across as arrogance is just an example of statistical illiteracy. Most (>> 50 percent of) people are very good at detecting patterns. People are very bad at averaging numbers of events, because the detected patterns stand out so much and are implicitly and unconsciously exaggerated. An example. "in my city people drive like crazy" in fact means: this week i was a lot on the road and i saw 2 out of 500 cars that did not follow the rules and there was even one honking. It 'felt' like crazy traffic but in fact it was not.

michaelmarkell 2y ago

The Monty hall problem is a great example of something I’ve been educated into believing, rationalizing, whatever you want to call it…but I would still never claim I “understand it.” I think that’s maybe the source of disagreement here, there are many truly unintuitive outcomes of statistics that are not “understood” by most people in the most respectful sense of the word, even if we’ve been educated into knowing the formula, knowing how to come to the right answer, etc. It’s like in chess, I know that the Sicilian is a good opening, that I’m supposed to play a6 in the najdorf, but I absolutely do not “understand” the Najdorf, and I do think it’s fundamentally past the limit of most humans understanding.

tomlue 2y ago
you should totally spend some time thinking and experimenting with the monty hall problem then. It might not be as tricky as you think.

wisty 2y ago

The vast majority of people are not that great at statistics. Even something as banal as "correlation is not causation, and can often be explained by a common cause" will blow a fair few minds (e.g. telling most people that old chestnut about how the murder rate is correlated with ice cream sales).