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Trump HUMILIATED by math
Innumerate and illiterate Trump back in public
This goes to that “Trump can’t read” conspiracy theory, which explains the observable behavior of why Trump largely won’t and doesn’t even pretend to read, and tears up all the papers his WH staff give him, after not reading it. Why he has to hire somebody to write all his tweets for him.
It also goes to the “Trump has dementia”/“Trump is sundowning”/“Trump has Alzheimer’s” set of allegations, a conspiracy hypothesis that anyone can look at the publicly visible symptoms and diagnose.
There’s also the simple, “Trump is stupid” but I think that’s dangerous misinformation. My belief is that “Trump is illiterate” but also cunning, evil, malicious, and largely successful towards his goals (ie, not “accidentally” evil). This doesn’t exclude the “Trump has dementia” — rather, that’s a possibility too. But not stupid.
Illiteracy and innumeracy explain Trump’s appallingly bad math and the rest of his idiosyncrasies that we’ve seen publicly during his growing consolidation of power. #trumpism
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Is the US making $2bn from tariffs - and other Trump claims - BBC News
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Innumeracy and Letby
Its use has prompted unusually vocal criticism from leading statisticians. They argue that the chart represents a classic example of the “prosecutor’s fallacy,” in which an investigation starts with only a suspicion, and a case is built to support it, rather than all possible evidence and explanations having been rigorously explored. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/10/lucy-letby-police-cps-handling-case-raises-new-concerns-about-convictions
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Happy New Year 2024 Blog!!!
Happy New Year 2024 Blog!!! #math #maths #Mathematics #numeracy #innumeracy #computers #Science #teacher #teaching #EdTech #MathChat #SciChat #CompSci #HPC #STEAMchat https://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com/2024/01/happy-new-year-2024.html
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Again, the issue here is to explain in words a behavior that we have no intuition for. The math, however, is very clear and effective.
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OUR FOOLISH OBSESSION WITH SERIAL KILLERS: “I ask whether killing people within the wide swath of humanity that the police don’t care about actually means you’re smart.”
Violent Delights - Believer Magazine
The serial killer media industrial complex rages on, but what has it taught us? Very little about the crimes in question, and much more about ourselves.
After all this killing, which is the only way headline writers are allowed to express that Kraft Singles saw a 1.6 percent decline in sales in 2018, it’s remarkable that there was anything left to destroy. But somehow, we managed. ARE AMERICAN SERIAL KILLERS A DYING BREED? a Guardian headline wondered in 2018, and to me, the answer was clear.
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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 14, 2022 — Squarely at the corner of two of this sub's interests: poor numeracy and identity politics
So Yougov published a study of people’s perceptions of the size of minority groups today, and it is hilarious.
The sample size isn’t tiny: two separate studies each with 1,000 respondents. But the answers are truly baffling.
Among other responses, Americans think:
- 20% of the country has a household yearly income >$1 million (actual number: 0%)
- 21% of Americans are transgender (1%)
- 27% are Muslim (1%)
- 27% are Native American (1%)
- 30% are Jewish (2%)
- 30% live in New York City (3%)
- 30% are gay or lesbian (3%)
- 40% are veterans (6%)
- 41% are black (12%)
Go and look at the results, they’re quite interesting. The survey respondents tend to do decently on guessing the populations that are ~50%; the guesses for people who are Republic, or who have one child, or are married, etc. are all close to the mark. But once you start veering away from the middle the guesses get really bad, really fast.
There are a couple immediate impressions. First of all people are really, really bad at this and while that’s not exactly news it’s again shocking to see how far off people are. But at the same time it’s not exactly obvious what the culprit is; maybe you could make the argument that blacks, Jews, and New Yorkers are overestimated because they are overrepresented in media, but that doesn’t make sense given how Natives or Muslims are similarly overestimated.
What my guess is just looking at this is that people simply have a hard time marrying numbers to physical reality. A number like 30% doesn’t mean anything material to them, it’s just a substitute for “a little”, just like 90% is a stand-in for “a lot”.
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NIH Head’s Shocking Innumeracy - Econlib
NIH Head’s Shocking Innumeracy – Econlib
I think traditionally people kind of considered, well, you know, kids aren’t going to get that sick with this. It [sic] more than 400 children have died of COVID-19. And right now we have almost 2,000 kids in the hospital, many of them in ICU, some of them under the age of four. So anybody who tries to tell you, well, don’t worry about the kids, the virus won’t really bother them, that’s not the…
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It takes only about eleven-and-a-half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass.
Modern Homo sapiens is probably less than 10 trillion seconds old; and the subsequent complete disappearance of the Neanderthal version of early Homo sapiens occurred only a trillion or so seconds ago.
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An annual Defense Department budget of almost a third of a trillion dollars amounts to approximately $5,000 per year for a family of four. What have all these expenditures bought over the years? The TNT equivalent of all the nuclear weapons in the world amounts to 25,000 megatons, or 50 trillion pounds, or 10,000 pounds for every man, woman, and child on earth. (One pound in a car, incidentally, demolishes the car and kills everyone it it.)
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It would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur.
If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.
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Consider two baseball players, say, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. During the first half of the season, Babe Ruth hits for a higher batting average than Lou Gehrig. And during the second half of the season, Babe Ruth again hits for a higher average than Lou Gehrig. But for the season as whole, Lou Gehrig has a higher batting average than Babe Ruth. Could this be the case?
What can happen is that Babe Ruth could hit .300 the first half of the season and Lou Gehrig only .290, but Ruth could bat two hundred times to Gehrig’s one hundred times. During the second half of the season, Ruth could bat .400 and Gehrig only .390, but Ruth could come to bat only a hundred times to Gehrig’s two hundred times at bat. The result would be a higher overall batting average for Gehrig than for Ruth: .357 vs. .33.
You can’t average batting averages.
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We should all remember that our impressions of others are usually filtered, and that our sampling of people and their moods is not random.
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“I Was Never Good At Math” Brags Woman In Charge Of Your Medical Care
Mathematical illiterate and girl who works in the ever-expanding field of providing you with geriatric medical treatment, Emily Duquesne, boasted openly to a small group of lunchtime friends that she “got nauseous” just thinking about trying to calculate the tip.
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The average person’s inability to meaningfully distinguish between a million and a billion is a big part of why there’s not more outrage over the extremes of wealth inequality. Most people are closer to being a millionaire than a one-million-dollar millionaire is to being one of the richest of the rich. One might make a reasonable argument that, in some cases, someone earned millions through their work and skill. No one gets billions without mass exploitation.
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Has anyone actually studied what impact an extra hour of daylight will have on crops?
#DaylightSavingTime #Innumeracy
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Such idiocy. If Bill Gates walks into a bar with 89 people, the average bar customer becomes a billionaire. https://t.co/0suWQJ3Ry9
— Nicholas Christakis (@NAChristakis) 23 October 2017
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Statistics and Innumeracy
“Technically every distribution has sufficient statistics, though the sufficient statistic might be the same size as the original data set, in which case the sufficient statistic hasn’t contributed anything useful.”