Came here via your twitter thread on Boris Johnson's innumeracy. Before I get started, note that I am no fan of the tories, or Johnson.
Johnson's failure to grasp the statistics presented to him falls into the category of human error, not stupidity. The inability to correctly interpret statistics when presented as percentages is something that affects the population as a whole, including medical professionals. Most infamously, the false positive rate in HIV testing was presented to patients and professionals alike in terms of percentages, which had the knock-on effect of men taking their own lives as a result of their misunderstanding. Gigerenzer has published extensively on methods of presenting statistical information which dramatically reduces such misunderstandings, yet these simple methods have not percolated to people who discuss statistics with people who are not immersed in statistics for a living. In this case, the fault lies with those who presented the figures.
Came here via your twitter thread on Boris Johnson's innumeracy. Before I get started, note that I am no fan of the tories, or Johnson.
Johnson's failure to grasp the statistics presented to him falls into the category of human error, not stupidity. The inability to correctly interpret statistics when presented as percentages is something that affects the population as a whole, including medical professionals. Most infamously, the false positive rate in HIV testing was presented to patients and professionals alike in terms of percentages, which had the knock-on effect of men taking their own lives as a result of their misunderstanding. Gigerenzer has published extensively on methods of presenting statistical information which dramatically reduces such misunderstandings, yet these simple methods have not percolated to people who discuss statistics with people who are not immersed in statistics for a living. In this case, the fault lies with those who presented the figures.