This is not good!

Related Link » THE PIRAHÃ AND US
“The Pirahã language and culture seem to lack not only the words but also the concepts for numbers, using instead less precise terms like "small size", "large size" and "collection". And the Pirahã people themselves seem to be suprisingly uninterested in learning about numbers, and even actively resistant to doing so, despite the fact that in their frequent dealings with traders they have a practical need to evaluate and compare numerical expressions. [...] Many people find this hard to believe. These are simple and natural concepts, of great practical importance: how could rational people resist learning to understand and use them? I don't know the answer.

But I do know that we can investigate a strictly comparable case, equally puzzling to me, right here in the U.S. of A. Until about a hundred years ago, our language and culture lacked the words and ideas needed to deal with the evaluation and comparison of sampled properties of groups. Even today, only a minuscule proportion of the U.S. population understands even the simplest form of these concepts and terms. [...] The rest of the population is surprisingly uninterested in learning, and even actively resists the intermittent attempts to teach them, despite the fact that in their frequent dealings with social and biomedical scientists they have a practical need to evaluate and compare the numerical properties of representative samples. [...]

Does this matter? Well, in the newspapers every week, there are dozens of stories about risks and rewards, epidemiology and politics, social trends and psychological differences, with serious public-policy and personal-lifestyle implications, which you can't understand without understanding distribution-talk. And usually you won't just feel baffled — instead, you'll think you understand, and draw the wrong conclusions.

In fact, the people who write these stories mostly don't understand distribution-talk themselves, and in any case they believe that they need to write for an audience that doesn't understand it. As a result, news stories on these topics are usually impossible to understand correctly unless you go back to the primary sources in order to recover the information that's been distorted or omitted.”
— Mark Liberman, October 06, 2007 (LANGUAGE LOG)

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“One, two, many.” — Primitive number theory

“Million, billion, gazillion.” — Popular number theory

“$1 trillion here, $1 trillion there, pretty soon you're talkin' real money.” — Federal monetary policy

“It's all relative.” — Big Al Einstein

I have frequently alluded to such issues in these pages (see, for example, What is wrong with you?). The basic problem, and it is very serious, as well as ubiquitous, is that, by and large, people have no sense of proportion. Even worse, they don't appreciate the relative importance of that blind spot in their daily lives.

And so our statistically-challenged leaders, concoct cockamamie monetary policies, feed their delusional concepts to the mushroom-brained media, who meld the garbage-input with their personal misconceptions and biases, and report the resulting garbage-output to the cool kids who flunked arithmetic. Moreover, the American-Idol worshipers, who haven't quite abandoned their extra-terrestrial Disney-world fantasies, are made to flitter from one looming cataclysm to another, as the intelligentsia propagates its own misconceptions to the easily confused and the perpetually perplexed.

What we have here is not just failure to communicate; we have utter unwillingness to comprehend the concept of nuance. We live in a society where the trivial is celebrated in Technicolor, while the essentials are evaluated in black and white (or white and black, for the politically correct or incorrect). We don't need no stinking grey-scale.

There's good; there's not good. This is not good.

Post #1,127 This is not good!