Innumeracy. Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences

TOC

1. Examples and principles
2. Probability and coincidence
3. Pseudoscience
4. Whence innumeracy
5. Statistics, Trade-offs, and Society

Quotes

The moral is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will.

… it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur.

There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.

There is a strong general tendency to filter out the bad and the failed and to focus on the good and the successful.

If one’s model or one’s data are no good, the conclusions that follow won’t be either.

There always seem to be escape clauses which can account for everything.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion.

…the desire to filter and emphasize information is at odds with the desire to obtain a random sample.

Notes

It is useful to have a list of things to explain large/small numbers.

Prisoner’s dilemma for N people (Robert Wolfl).

Capture-recapture – a method for sample size estimation.

Type I/II errors for FDA and monotheistic religion.