Well, if we're telling stats jokes...

A statistician is a man who with his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven can say "On the whole I feel perfectly normal."

Recommended reading: 'How to lie with statistics' - Huff, 1954

:)

You _have_ to change the numbers each time, because you're constantly measuring and these things have basic variation. It would be unrealistic if the fake statistics were the same every time!

> the quote popularized by Mark Twain "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

I’m increasingly convinced this is a thought-terminating cliche. Understanding the difference between a median, mean and mode is fundamentally empowering. Enough people, however, will stop themselves from trying to understand that by quoting such a joke.

Another good one: success in business is 40% people skills, 30% technical knowledge, 20% work ethic, and 15% basic math.

With large sets or sequences of numbers approaching almost infinity, counting as a method of determining how large things are ... doesn't work well as you found out. To determine if ginormous set A is larger than ginormous set B, you have to do things like matching-pairing. For every element in set A, pair it with an element of set B; if you exhaust all of the elements in B but still have elements in A... then set A is larger than set B.

To formulate the probability of B happening, for example, you have to make an educated guess. Create a functional equation that map A (all possibilities) to B (desired possibility). Then you make a ratio-fraction with the equation in the numerator and set A in the denominator. Using Algebra, try to eliminate references to A in both the numerator and denominator to give you an educated guess of what the probability is.

In college, studying mathematics, probability was the course in did best in. The funny part is that I have a form of ilnumeria. Effectively I can’t count. As a result I have no desire to try to actually count things, and the easiest way for me to cope is by understanding the theory behind counting.

They do have an intuitive understanding! You just outlined it, and it works well enough for most things. Statistics is generally very useful, but for individuals it's not really important or useful to understand, because the data is rarely ever clear or trustworthy enough to use for making decisions about specific situations.

And how people don’t get how probabilities work when run over repeated instances. Like it is only 0,1% risk that X happens everytime Y is done which sounds low but then it turns out Y is done Z number of times per day…

The word “most” is a mess. Strictly speaking the person with “the most” has the plurality, not even half. “Most people” can mean more than half, but is often used to mean or imply anything from a supermajority to “almost everyone”.

XCOM should be added to the curriculum.

I think almost everyone threw a dice quite a few times while playing board games.

Fully agree. For example, I wish managers would be capable to handle the difference between a 40% and a 70% chance to meet the deadline.

And the older Anscombe's Quartet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

Related, this result on statistics comprehension is another stepping stone on my path away from believing in technocracy - a journey I’ve been on for the past 10 years and have felt more passionately about over the past 2 years.

I was recently convinced by a rather compelling argument that technocracy (rule by the technically capable) often falls to a local minima where the people in power find the first scrap of evidence that supports their preconceived agenda. Wildly racist? Natural selection “proves” that all of your decisions are “technically” justified.

But more directly to your point about being effective communicators of statistics, I’ve found that it’s difficult to help someone form their own conclusion from statistical results. Most people want the conclusion fed to them, with the statistics supplied as evidence. It’s up to us (proper statisticians) to act ethically: provide analyses in good faith and challenge the poorly conceived analyses of amateurs and statisticians acting in bad faith.

> And my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

In the university I went to, Department of Statistics used to be part of the Faculty of Social Sciences. It was impossible to graduate from social sciences without taking a few classes of statistics. Then in some reorganization, Department of Statistics merged with Department of Mathematics. Except that old-school statisticians didn't want to move to the Faculty of Science, and they somehow managed to keep their offices in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

> my degree from the social side didn't include statistics.

That's bonkers. Society is all about statistics, and the reverse. Without statistics any kind of social studies is only Just So stories.

Not quite.

Rhetoric is persuasion under the presupposition that what you are trying to persuade someone of is true. Sophistry is indifferent to the truth and is merely concerned with results. Rhetoric respects the humanity of the interlocutor. Sophistry seeks to exploit him.

> When told to a statistically illiterate person?

Which is a rounding error from 100% according to the GP.

Being aware of Simpsons' paradox doesn't even help. There's no way of knowing what the right level of aggregation is without a theory.

Really?

Why not 5% of Americans having the same average level of understanding and only 47.5% having a lower than average understanding?

What assumptions are you making, and why should they be true?

My thesis is that no-one understands. So there's no political orientation.

Your suggestion suggests that a little bit of technical education would change political allegiance. Alas that is incorrect. Politics is about worldview (me and mine versus you and yours) and a world view cannot be changed by something as mundane as education.

Each person has both a self-centered side, and a community-centered side. For some it's mostly self centered. For others mostly community centered. Politics is about finding out which side the population has swung to.

Here in Norway, statistics has been introduced in 9th and 10th grade (15 and 16 year olds). Here[1] is what a 9th grader is supposed to know at the end of the school year. Some key points translated to English:

- Interpret and critically evaluate statistical representations from the media and the local community.

- Calculate measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion in custom and real datasets, and use the results to describe the data.

- Calculate and evaluate probability in statistics and games.

This came after my time, and our PIRSA score aren't the best so perhaps practice is lacking.

[1]: https://www.udir.no/lk20/mat01-06/kompetansemaal-og-vurderin...

We are just as bad or worse with charts. I don’t know whether finding Tufte when I was still relatively young saved or harmed my sanity. Maybe both. Everyone’s charts are awful, including at least half of mine, and I was trying to be objective. Many people are just trying to prove a theory they had before the chart was made.

If you changed "most" to "all" you'd be well inside the margin or error.

There's a reason actuaries get paid the big bucks.

But definitions are very much important when discussing statistics. Being able to communicate using correct terminology is important. Part of knowledge is being able to ingest statistics produce by someone else.

Funny that you mentioned an effect that may just have been a statistical artifact after all [0, 1]

(Also, I assume you are joking in how you apply the effect here even assuming it is real)

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8992690/

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...