George Will: innumerate

I'm late to this, but Matt Yglesias called out George Will for throwing out ".01 percent" as a ridiculously high proportion of Americans to bike to work.

The actual fraction of Americans who bike to work is .4 percent. Which is a lot bigger.

You know, if someone just makes up words and/or applies random words to a situation without considering their meaning, that person is either illiterate or lying or both. And not even the socially acceptable lying or illiteracy. If you wrote a column for a newspaper and misdescribed a situation because you didn't know what the words you used meant, or because you picked words at random that you thought sounded vaguely like what you were reporting, you wouldn't keep a job writing columns for very long. Because literacy is a prerequisite for the job.

Shouldn't innumeracy preclude you from spouting numbers? George Will should perhaps leave the percentages to the staff of the local middle school newsletter, who are more qualified to handle them.

Innumeracy Footnote

One would have thought that Judd Gregg would have a clearer grasp of the significance of 0.479%, which is the proportion of Obama's proposed budget cut to the size of the budget.

I'd think he might think that'd be a significant proportion, since the state he represents (NH) is comprised of... 0.43% of the US population.

Apparently, he thinks his constituency are a "few pieces of sand" compared to the "Gobi desert".


Perhaps you feel like I've singled out Judd Gregg unfairly. In which case, I've got two responses.

First: hey, I'm lazy. I'm not monitoring all the politicians for their ridiculous innumeracies. But if you let me know about it, I _will_ post what analysis I can muster -- it's obvious I can't help it. (And yes, feel free to replace "analysis" with "smackdown".)

Second: maybe I do hold Mr. Gregg to a higher standard. I met him, I shook his hand, he said he'd do his best to serve New Hampshire, and he went to my high school. When he's intellectually lazy, it reflects on me. Step up or sit down, sir.

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Innumeracy followup

It's remarkably annoying to try to count out 200 grains of anything. So I played it safe -- I counted out 50 grains, what I'd spilled was over twice that, so I threw two more sprinkles on top. So that's definitely over 200 grains, probably around 300.

In other words, one of those grains is in proportion to that pile at the same ratio as Obama's budget cut is to the budget. That pile, in proportion to the Gobi Desert, is how inaccurate Judd Gregg's statement was.

Mr. Gregg's my first casualty -- take notice, politicos. You bring up the sand, you're in MY HOUSE.

No learning, no responsibility

This is a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

A kid may well blame himself for doing poor on a math test by saying he's stupid, but that doesn't mean he's taken responsibility, that he's acknowledged that he's capable of doing better the next time.

I bring this up because I thought it was insightful. It ties in well with one of the deep seated myths of math (and possibly other academic fields): "Either you can do math, or you can't." If you think about it, this simply denies the whole notion of learning. And if you assume you can't learn, that implies you're not capable of doing better. So, you're not responsible, right?

Shaking the Foundations of Mathematics

So, I was reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan this morning. It can be a bit pretentious (incessant quote-dropping, referring to his main concept "the Great Paradigm"), but it also has brilliant descriptions. Descriptions of historical developments in mathematics, but also descriptions of the properties of numbers that are so fundamental that one forgets how fascinating they are. For example, he points out the somewhat magical evolution of numbers from adjectives ("your four sheep and my eight sheep make a flock of twelve sheep") to nouns ("four and eight is twelve").

As a result, I was thinking that mathematics was born from the idea that you could abstract numbers from things. That is, four sheep and four sheep makes 8 sheep, AND 4 stones and 4 stones makes 8 stones, and so you can use stones to count your sheep and all the adding and subtracting and whatever works out fine.

(Sarah: Why on Earth were you thinking that?
Bob: Oh, contemplating the foundations of math and what it relates to comes with the territory. )

But we don't know that adding sheep and adding stones always works out. We just know that it almost always works out, and when it doesn't work out, usually it's because we lost a stone or a sheep or something, and eventually they turn up.
The only way the stones and sheep (and therefore, ALL numbers) wouldn't really match up is if the amount of things changed while we weren't looking. If sheep were flickering in and out of existence. Ridiculous!
...
But of course, we don't know where the sheep are when we're a sheep short, we just usually find them later. But sometimes, we lose stuff and it just seems to disappear. And sometimes we find it again, but somewhere we definitely checked before. So maybe this flickering in and out of existence does happen.

(Sarah: Oh, it TOTALLY does.
It is an especially common phenomenon among socks.
It is an especially common phenomenon within dryers.)

What's more, I am a big fan of Dad's observation that "There are things that are true, and things that are false, and also things whose truth value is not so fixed. In particular, there are statements that are true if you believe them." (Don't believe me? How about "I can't do math?" I'm not saying disbelieving it will make it false, but you can't simultaneously believe you're incapable of it and do it, regardless of what "it" is.)

So what if the sheep and stones and keys and socks would flicker MORE, except that we BELIEVE in mathematics?

(Sarah: That's entirely true. If you don't believe in socks getting lost in the dryer, they won't be lost in the dryer. But misplace one sock and BELIEVE it got lost in the dryer and you will never pull a matching pair of socks from your dryer again.)

If so, the extent of things flickering in and out of existence is, like an inverse Tinkerbell thing, derived from people's innumeracy, specifically their failure to believe in the consistency of numbers. After all, when we say "hmm...I've got two more stones here than sheep...oh well, there must be two more sheep out there I haven't seen", then we go look for the sheep. If we just said "Oh well, more stones than sheep", we may never see those sheep again. And they might not even BE anymore.

(Sarah: You must post this discussion to the blog. I mean what is a blog with an INNUMERACY tag if no one posts about innumeracy?
It would be as though innumeracy doesn't exist.
It went the way of the sheep for which there are stones.)

In conclusion:

• First, it's a good thing we are teaching kids times tables and stuff, because if we weren't, we could lose whole people (Amelia Earhart), whole ships (in the Bermuda Triangle), whole cities (Atlantis)...OMG, maybe we have!
  
  (Sarah: We totally did.
  No one believed a woman could fly around the world . . . and Amelia Earhart ceased to exist.)
  
• And Second, this is a dangerously self-fulfilling thing. All the wrong answers from all the students aren't wrong in the sense that there's an objective truth they're failing to fulfill, they're wrong because we desperately cling to what we need to be right.
  

(Sarah: I had this dream last night where the I said, "I live in a constant state of the contingency of if-ness."
I'm not making that up.
It's totally true.
And then you started this conversation.
And my dream came true.
God, I have to start having more interesting dreams.
Bob: That is wild. And doesn't "contingency" mean "if-ness"?
Sarah: Which is exactly what I thought when I woke up.
Like word for freakin' word.
Bob: We're uncanny. Like X-Men.
Sarah: LOL
If only we were self-regenerating and our bones covered in Adamantium also like X-Men.
Gotta run.
Bob: ttyl)

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Round Up

In this round up: hipsters in NYC, everyone deserves defense, color IQ, Denyse Schmidt quilts for Obama, Ikea fabric, backyard chickens, alternative dog poo disposal.

P.S. I've added a new link or two to the Color Theory Index.

I'm going to NYC on my east coast tour in a week and I am, perhaps not shockingly, too cheap to get a hotel room. So I'm staying with my friend Elisa and her roommate. I am SO not cool enough.

Over dinner at my brother's wedding, my mother's significant other decided to drill me about who I would defend if I were a criminal defense attorney. My mom's S.O.'s radical inappropriateness aside, my answer was something like Peter Keane's piece in the This I Believe series on NPR: Everyone Deserves Defense.

Interested in quantifying your ability to arrange color? Got things to do that you really don't want to do? Need to look busy on your computer without actually doing anything too taxing? Test your color IQ via True Up. Beware: the graph at the end comparing your results to other folks of your age and gender is completely f--ed. Certain mathematicians, who we'll just call "Bob" for the sake of argument, would call said graph an example of innumeracy.

Check out dogged's post about an eye-bending Obama quilt designed by the very popular quilt designer Denyse Schmidt to be auctioned off to benefit the Obama campaign. Via Dogs and Laughter.

I am seriously contemplating Ikea's $5.99 per yard Inger fabric. It's 59 inches wide, so it would make a great backing fabric. And I've got some projects that are looking for some oversized black and white prints to be overdyed, so this might be just the thing. The only thing giving me pause is the extremely low thread count of some of the Ikea cloth goods I've purchased in the past. I better go check these out in person. And maybe have some Swedish meatballs and a cinnamon bun while I'm at it. Via Domino via Design*Sponge.

More support for backyard chicken coops via the Organic Consumers Association.

Another alternative to plastic grocery bags for dog waste disposal: Skooperbox Biodegradable Poop Scoop Boxes via Re-Nest.

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It's not politics, it's math!

No, really! Here, let me show you...wait, where are you going?...Come back!

Okay, for anyone who hasn't run screaming, here's the political/media intro. If you're like me, you've heard talking heads give one-sentence summaries of Obama's tax breaks for 95% of ....

finish that sentence. Then click the "...see the rest..." to see if we agree.


The pundits/reporters I've heard lately say "95% of the middle-class" (or middle-class families or middle-class taxpayers or whatever.)

This is in fact categorically false, if you think about it.

Obama's plan has tax breaks for "the 95 percent-plus of the American population that earns less than $250,000". That of course includes lower class incomes (no matter how you define that), and assuming you're not John McCain, all the middle class too.

Rebecca tells me that I just came upon a reporter parroting the Republican line about "95% of the middle class". Of course, this false characterization serves their purposes, since it engenders the question "what 5% of the middle class is Obama leaving out? Am I in that 5%?" when of course, if you really are middle class, you have nothing to worry about.

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Innumeracy Watch: post #B

So, I'm stepping through a Flash-driven online course on computer security that I'm required to take so that I can learn how to be a HUMAN FIREWALL (always capitalized, apparently), and I learn that "RISK = Vulnerability x Threat x Asset Value". Of course, those terms on the right hand side are carefully defined for me.

Only one of them is actually a NUMBER.

Bob's Innumeracy watch

Apologies to Ms. Beard for posting the whole article, but hey, if your math wasn't deceptive I wouldn't be forced to do this.

clipped from www.azcentral.com Betty Beard The Arizona Republic Apr. 6, 2008 09:05 PM The recent rise in Phoenix's housing prices means that in some cases the cost of owning a house grew too high compared with the cost of renting one, says a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. Based on 2006 housing costs, the cost of renting in the Phoenix area averages $862 while the average cost of owning can range from $1,343 to $1,804, depending on interest rates, the report said. That means that Phoenix rental costs can range from 47 to 64 percent of ownership costs. The report says that when ownership costs exceed 50 percent, it indicates a bubble. Some "extraordinary" gaps include New York City, where it costs 109 percent more to own a home than to rent; San Diego, 133 percent; San Francisco, 161 percent; and Los Angeles, 168 percent.

The percentages cited for other cities use a middle-cost scenario, while the Phoenix range of costs for owning is the low-cost and high-cost scenarios. So even if you knew better, you'd need to read the article to find the apples-to-apples comparison, which is this: the cost of ownership in Phoenix exceeds the cost of renting by 78%.

That's what those percentages mean, by the way: the article drops some critical words -- it should be "...when ownership costs exceed rental costs by 50 percent or more, it indicates a bubble."

Oh, and that "47 to 64 percent"? That's dividing the cost of renting by the (low and high scenario) cost of owning, which isn't directly comparable to any of the other results. Also, since that result isn't particularly meaningful, it's NOT in the original report, as opposed to all the other numbers in the article.