Read books by John Allen Paulos, e.g., "Innumeracy" and "Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" for many examples how people have no intuitive (or learned) grasp of statistics or quantities beyond 4 apples and 3 oranges.
There is also a great little book, I think it's title is "How to lie with statistics" or something like that....
October 3, 2004 at 9:54 PM
This week's class was particularly interesting to me because of the discussion of how people do not rationalize according to probability. Using my terms, they appear to interpolate using coarse descriptors.
Example: which is more probable: a earthquake in California resulting in a tidal wave that will kill 1000 people OR an earthquake in North America that will kill 1000 people.
More people choose the former, even though the latter is more probable. Why? Because one's conception of North America is basically Nebraska and what earthquakes exist in Nebraska? Obviously, earthquakes are a California thing.
We also discussed empathy at length, conversing about different research on how empathy operates in the brain. Basically, you have until about the age of 5 to build empathy. In a strict father culture, empathy is not something that is nurtured and thus it tends to die away. This devolved into a conversations about whether or not libertarians were the ultimate un-empathetic creatures...
"probability"
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Read books by John Allen Paulos, e.g., "Innumeracy" and "Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" for many examples how people have no intuitive (or learned) grasp of statistics or quantities beyond 4 apples and 3 oranges.
There is also a great little book, I think it's title is "How to lie with statistics" or something like that....
October 3, 2004 at 9:54 PM