#innumeracy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #innumeracy, aggregated by home.social.
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Journalistic innumeracy or conscious spinning?
1. A Lancet study estimates the death toll by traumatic injuries in Gaza at 170% the official numbers.
2. The Guardian titles… "40% higher", and then jumps, before reaching a third of the article, to the reaction of some Israeli official.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02678-3/fulltext
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@ColinTheMathmo Re: (in)numeracy and leaders:
Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists
N. J. Enfield, Mar 23, 2022, MIT PRESS 2022
Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield shows that human lexicons the world over are far more coarse-grained than our perceptual faculties. Yet, at the same time, languages vary in the structure and sophistication of their representations. This means that, for instance, how different languages carve up the world influences not only how their speakers talk about the world, but also how they think about it. The book explores a range of linguistic phenomena, from lexical diversity to linguistic framing to the effects of narrative. As a result of understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality, Enfield argues that we can make more informed—and more ethical—decisions about our own language use, as individuals and communities.*
On the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/language-vs-reality
Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2798566261.mp3 (MP3)
Enfield's key point is that language is useful for social coordination. Numbers ... for quantification.
Also: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
(In numerous variations, more likely Beilby Porteus circa 1759 than Joseph Stalin. See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/.)
Referring to your sadly languishing HN submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41228696
#Numeracy #Innumeracy #HackerNews #NewBooksNetwork #NickJEnfield #Language
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@conradhackett
When we speak of #innumeracy in #AmericanEducation, we often speak of the inability of citizens to read a graph. It's math illiteracy.
As a retired math educator, I'm calling the #USHeathcareSystem expense v outcome debacle as an example of citizen innumeracy.
I'm glad to report that it is generational, and that younger folk can read this graph.
#UniversalHealthcare