Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/shameful_innumeracy_in_the_new.php

62 22 17 years ago

I actually kind of enjoyed watching this guy spin himself into a frenzy and conclude that the NYT editors have no basic understanding of anything, based solely on what could have easily just been a typo. Some people really have too much time on their hands.

steveitis• 17 years ago

You posted a comment about your enjoyment of the authors failure, and judged his time management skills due to the fact that he posted his rant about another persons failure on the internet.

Do you not see the hypocrisy?

IsaacSchlueter• 17 years ago

Isn't your response to the comment (and my response to yours) guilty of the same fault?

If we keep going like this, we'll meta ourselves up a black hole or something.

codexon• 17 years ago

His 2 sentence comment likely took up a lot less time than the author's rant.

gloob• 17 years ago

The commenter you responded to wasn't being amused by the author's time management skills (or lack thereof). He was amused by the author's emotional state.

So, no, they aren't being hypocritical about it.

bugs• 17 years ago

Especially considering his evidence is limited to one short article in the opinion section.

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

You may want to follow up by reading this, or other books by Paulos:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/038548254X/

camccann3• 17 years ago

Sure, it could have been a typo, or some other minor mistake.

But he's also correct that it's hilariously wrong. Is it really asking too much that something published in the New York Times either have sufficient editing and proofreading to not make an embarrassing typo, or refrain from using terms they don't understand the meaning of, whichever the case may be?

Even if it's only an editorial, it undermines confidence in the paper as a whole. How often do they make similarly silly mistakes on things where I don't know better?

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

comment #6 on the blog said

"Some well established federal organizations (ie, NIH) do percentiles backwards. That is, 85 percentile score better than 15%. Maybe that's what's going on...."

jacobolus• 17 years ago

I’d really like to see a better explanation of that, or some evidence. It’s possible to order things from “best” to “worst”, with the bottom one percent being the best, but there’s really no way to interpret “below the 85th percentile” as anything other than “among the bottom 85%” without some special, personal, opposites-day definition of “percentile”.

To show that at least some at the NIH have a perfectly reasonable understanding of percentiles, here’s a chart of boy’s blood pressure by height percentile: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/hypertension/child_tbl.p...

The NIH’s percentile scoring system for grant applications certainly knows the proper meaning of “percentile”: http://www.med.nyu.edu/spa/education/PaylinesDescription.htm...

My guess is that the commenter was mistaken.

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

Half of all low-income students have below average test scores! We need new laws, new taxes, and new government initiatives to fix this problem!

Evgeny• 17 years ago

So we could spend all the money and happily report that as a result of huge investments in education half of all low-income students now have above average test scores - a great improvement indeed!

thaumaturgy• 17 years ago

Hmm. Half of all students in middle- to high-income families now have below-average test scores.

Clearly there must be no correlation between income and intelligence!

Dove• 17 years ago

Be careful about distributions; not everything's a bell curve.

Consider: 99% of Americans own a below-average number of houseboats.

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

There are 3 different measures of "average", just choose average = median and you're set.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

> I just never quite manage to absorb how clueless the average person is.

Gawrsh, I'm shore glad we have these here science bloggers to help drag us clueless folks out of the mud.

camccann3• 17 years ago

Reality check: The median regular poster on HN is probably in the 95th percentile or better for intelligence, knowledge, and general cluefulness. Hell, the median poster on slashdot is probably well above average.

The bloggers on ScienceBlogs are, in general, competent, intelligent, and well-educated. A faux-folksy disdain for competence plays well for the masses, but politically correct or not there is such thing as actual expertise and I don't know why you're insulting someone for pointing out that a large majority of people are completely unequipped to discuss anything involving even very basic statistics (or any other practical math).

newsio• 17 years ago

The author is the same person who wrote the much-commented scienceblogs post about why he won't go to his high school reunion. The post and the comments are well worth reading, if you haven't seen them before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709733

Eliezer• 17 years ago

As a teenager, I had an almost exactly similar conversation to this with a line editor of the GED (after looking at a "sample question" on the official GED website). I exchanged a couple of emails and I'm pretty sure she flatly did not understand the concept of a percentile.

Yes, I'm sure that she was the problem and not me. I ran it past my father, a Ph.D. physicist, and he couldn't figure out how to attach a sane interpretation to her remarks either.

camccann3• 17 years ago

Speaking from personal experience, understanding the concept of much of anything is, alas, not really required to pass the GED. So I fear that anyone who can comprehend an advanced concept such as "percentiles" would be wasting their talents on anything involving the GED.

Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times

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