More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

ledoncool

wow, more than half..

floam

That’s surprisingly self-aware, and encouraging.

sans_souse

That's like ⅐ of the US population..

mattvr

The question asked as part of the survey: “how well do you understand p-values?” Most scientists may not even be able to pass truthfully. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_p-values

bruce511

>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation) I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0. Indeed, statistically, no-one has a clue how statistics work. I did however learn enough to know that statistics can tell you absolutely anything you want them to say. Assuming you don't just make them up, they're trivial to manipulate to generate the headline you want. When used to evaluate risk, the comprehension goes down further (a fact willfully exploited by any decent marketing.) Statistically, most statistics are meaningless.

arjie

> The survey showed that 62% of U.S. adults self-report having little to no idea what statistics or statistical concepts like p-values are, but 90% of them would base decisions on reported statistics at least sometimes if they understood them better. You're kidding, right? 38% self-report more than that? If their self-report were accurate it would imply an education system that has truly excelled.

simonw

> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values? Is that a well designed survey question? I would expect the use of a specific jargon term in that question to affect the results in a significant way.

jdw64

What does it really mean to properly understand p-value? What I remember is that if the p-value is less than 0.05, the research result is considered statistically significant. That's about as far as my memory goes. I know that's actually a misunderstanding, but that's how most people understand it. I'm not sure how much I need to know to say I truly understand it.

maccard

> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values? I suspect that it’s far far less than 38% of people who actually understand statistics to this level. I suspect if someone on HN went around and asked their co workers to explain what a P value is in 2 sentences, it would be less than 10% of a (presumably) highly educated workforce. I suspect about 40% of adults are unable to tell the difference between mean/median/ mode, or could answer the Monty hall problem, or even “if I flip a coin 3 times are the chances I get heads 3 times in a row”

NitpickLawyer

I'd say in reality it's way more than that. The first statistics course in uni was a very humbling experience. I realised that while I thought I understood a lot (and I was coming from a CS heavy background, olympiads and such) real statistics is way harder and a lot more counterintuitive than I thought. Granted, this talks about "basic" statistical understanding, but even that is way more complicated than most people assume.

BLKNSLVR

I love how they include statistics in the headline of a story about the lack of understanding of statistics. Epic troll. 100% of headlines of statistics-related articles must follow this rule.

blackbear_

This was abundantly clear when people, even on HN, were upset about the bureau of labor statistics revising their numbers tendentially downwards, probably confusing the notion of statistical bias for that of political bias. If the figures are biased, just estimate the bias and correct for that, what is the big deal they said, as if the bias variance tradeoff was not a thing.

_joel

Well, that's what happens when you use words like math and not maths. Although us Brits aren't that much better.

idoubtit

The fact that 62% of Americans have little or no understanding of statistics may be related to those 40% of Americans that believe in Creationism, i.e. human (and fossils) were created by God a few thousands of years ago, and not of randomness and evolution over millions of years. I think no other industrial country has that disbelief in science. https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati... This problem with science is apparent in another survey: in 2009, a Pew Center publication showed that 33% of scientists in the USA believed in God (and 18% in a transient power), which is much lower than the 80% belief of the general American population at the time. Of course, this is not a proof of causality in either direction, but scientific knowledge is seemingly inversely correlated to religiosity. And the USA are still more religious than any other industrial more-or-less-democratic country.

dataflow

Even leaving aside the quantitative stuff (p-values, medians, whatever) and can't crunch the math, IMHO at least you should have seen how statistics can lead you to the exact opposite conclusion from reality, so that you at least know whether to think twice about a conclusion drawn from statistics thrown at you. Yet I was recently quite surprised to learn that even many folks in tech had never encountered Simpson's paradox before. All it takes to start explaining that is a scatterplot and a few lines, and yet it doesn't seem to be taught widely. It's rather terrifying, given that most people (myself often included) will be happy to believe "obvious" conclusions drawn from seeing one percentage greatly exceed another.

raincole

A coarse understanding like "the smaller p-value is the more likely a headline is true" is worse than no understanding at all. I bet most people who believed they understood what p-value is are like that though.

applfanboysbgon

38% of Americans say they have some familiarity with statistics. On a somewhat related note, 8% of Americans say they can beat a gorilla in a fist-fight.

wafflemaker

I would be more likely to believe the results if they tested these adults and not asked them. There's a big ego hit in admitting you don't know something. And many people are brought up thinking that it's a shame not to know something and that someone is better for knowing something. Like, a better person, not just better in some field.

dr_dshiv

“Fortunately, concepts in statistics are grounded in intuition and rationality.“ Yeaaah… let’s talk about that. Seems like a fair bit of stats were designed to intimidate —so as to get people to stop asking questions. Or at least that is the effect! Stats designed for intuition are few. See Kill Math for how it might be done: https://worrydream.com/KillMath/

zippyman55

There is the old joke that 87 percent of all statistics is made up on the spot. I’ve told it many times but a fair amount of people seemed to believe it hook, line, and sinker.