Numeracy
Our colleagues in the on-line world have done a good job of defending last week’s study that tried to show the true extent of the violence in Iraq. I think the best defense was here*and here.
The funny thing that comes through as right-wingers, war supporters and other innumerates try to debunk the study is that people appear to believe words before they believe numbers. They have more faith in the blandishments of their political leaders than they do in empirical, statistically verified evidence. This reminds me of Saheli’s† post almost a year ago about the need for more people to learn quantitative methods.
*Maybe I’m just pointing you this way because Majikthise, the author, has taken as her name that of the head of the philosophers’ union in the Hitchhikers Guide series, which gives her big nerd cred.
†Why, just tonight she mentioned that she had heard a lecture and afterward regretted not asking for “the graph of the derivative” of global temperature over time. I realized that even though I’m pretty numerate, calculus is still enough of a foreign language to me that I wouldn’t have thought to ask this perfectly reasonable question in such an elegant way.
posted by hedgehog in Iraq | 15 Comments
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