Innumeracy in public media today

[Vanadium 50]

how anyone could even GET 137%.

Modern journalism - never let facts get ih the way of a good story. I'm serious. I don't think anyone thought it was important to get the numbers right.

At the risk of discussing content, the four-year contract for the NBA's #1 draft choice is approximately the same as the total annual WNBA ticket sales across all teams.

 

[martix]

I ran into an interesting subreddit recently - r/confidentlyIncorrect
Simple math blunders are quite popular there, after reading dozens of them a pattern emerged.

Usually it's in the form of if you have 600 million dollars and there are 300 million americans, you can give every american 2 million dollars - notice what's going on here - treat the numbers and the descriptors as separate things - so 600/300 = 2, and append "million".

The other popular post on there is "solve <simple problem statement>, DONT USE CALCULATOR", that usually involves order of operations and never has any parentheses. [Example]

Some people never acquire the correct mental models to deal with even simple math. As a programmer - they tokenize the sentences all wrong. For most people "600 million" is one token that gets converted into the mental representation of a large number. For others "600" and "million" is separate.

I have like a tier list of common mathematical confusion:
1. 600-million class, like above.
2. Order of operations class.
3. Percentages - they are quite tricky.
4. Probability - human brains not built to handle this well (or probably just not educated)

For myself, I find that 1 and 2 are automatic, 3 sometimes automatic, sometimes I have to stop and think whether a situation falls into the weird edge case, 4 - stop and carefully think through the situation 90% of the time.

 

[Klystron]

While baffled by ubiquitous use of percentages in media publications when simple arithmetic would suffice, my pet peeve concerns units of measurement. One supposes journalists wish to provide reference objects common to their readers, but a beached whale, for example, has length "some percentage of a football field" and masses "how many jumbo jets?".

At least once a year I ask my daily (American) 'newspapers-of-record' to at least use SI units, if only parenthetically. "One meter is approximately one giant step; close to one yard."

 

[kuruman]

What they meant was that his salary is approx 137 times larger than hers. 137 being, of course, the fine structure constant!

Isn't 137 approximatey 1,876,900% of the fine structure constant's actual value?

 

[phinds]

Isn't 137 approximatey 1,876,900% of the fine structure constant's actual value?

Possibly, but if so, I am sure it is fully explained in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

 

[kuruman]

Possibly, but if so, I am sure it is fully explained in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

I looked. The answer is 42.

 

[gmax137]

Isn't 137 approximatey 1,876,900% of the fine structure constant's actual value?

Well, maybe.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Indigenous North American languages like Kewa and Dine use base 4 arithmetic. My wife ran a trading post on Dine (Navajo Reservation) found that things went better with numeric transactions in Dine - base4

https://lingspace.pages.wm.edu/indigenous-languages-north-america/

 

[kuruman]

Indigenous North American languages like Kewa and Dine use base 4 arithmetic. My wife ran a trading post on Dine (Navajo Reservation) found that things went better with numeric transactions in Dine - base4

It seems to me that using base 2 arithmetic would go even better. Either you give customers the change that they're owed or you don't.