Damned Lies and Statistics

Оглавление

Joel Best. Damned Lies and Statistics

Отрывок из книги

PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITION OF DAMNED LIES AND STATISTICS:

“Definitely a must for politicians, activists, and others who generate or use statistics, but especially for those who want to think for themselves rather than take as gospel every statistic presented to them.”

.....

In part, this is because we are innumerate. Innumeracy is the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy; it is “an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance.”9 Just as some people cannot read or read poorly, many people have trouble thinking clearly about numbers.

One common innumerate error involves not distinguishing among large numbers. A very small child may be pleased by the gift of a penny; a slightly older child understands that a penny or even a dime can’t buy much, but a dollar can buy some things, ten dollars considerably more, and a hundred dollars a great deal (at least from a child’s point of view). Most adults clearly grasp what one can do with a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, even one hundred thousand dollars, but then our imaginations begin to fail us. Big numbers blend together: a million, a billion, a trillion—what’s the difference? They’re all big numbers. (Actually, of course, there are tremendous differences. The difference between a million and a billion is the difference between one dollar and one thousand dollars; the difference between a million and a trillion is the difference between one dollar and a million dollars.)

.....