Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

Registered by ICTurner of Madrid, Madrid Spain on 5/10/2017
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by ICTurner from Madrid, Madrid Spain on Wednesday, May 10, 2017
I picked up this book in Jaguar House hostel in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

It was an enjoyable read. I don't consider myself an innumerate person, and none of the maths or statistics surprised me. However, it was eye-opening and sometimes truly shocking to read about many of the instances of innummeracy, some of them in areas that I would not have thought about.

A few things annoyed me slightly. There were many sports examples. Large numbers of people, myself included, have no interest in or knowledge of those types of sports, making the examples opaque. Worsening this, they were all American sports, which are largely unpopular in the rest of the world. The author gives the famous example of the probability of two people from a group sharing a birthday, but he slips from using 366 to 365 without explanation and fails to include "approximately" to cover either case or the fact that births per date actually do vary significantly. In one section, "1/10th" is used a couple of times in place of either "1/10" or "one 10th", which was really grating. The author dismisses the importance of metrication at one point, which is odd as that is certainly one reason for Americans' innumeracy: it makes the relationship between different magnitudes much easier to grasp, and also that between for example size and weight. (The other day I knew a laundry was trying to con me when they claimed my clothes weighed nine kilograms because I could easily estimate that they were much less than four and a half two-litre bottles of water.) The phrase "a black" is used instead of "a black man": using the adjective as a noun like this is very old-fashioned and remiscent of South Africa under apartheid. Worst of all, the author gives as an example of correlation not equating to causation milk consumption and cancer. He claims that both of these are in fact simply correlated with longevity. Studies increasingly show that milk consumption has all kinds of negative health consequences, so it would be better to use an example more likely to stand up to the test of time.

Journal Entry 2 by ICTurner at Loki Hostel in Cuzco, Cusco Peru on Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Released 6 yrs ago (6/28/2017 UTC) at Loki Hostel in Cuzco, Cusco Peru

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I left it in the bookcase in the reception area.

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