INNUMERACY
Brad DeLong says that Andrew Sullivan, like most reporters, is innumerate. This doesn’t surprise me at all, really. I know a lot of highly intelligent, overeducated people. Most are very good at words or numbers. Few are very good at both. While I did well enough in my stats classes and am at least conversant enough in numbers to be skeptical of bad reporting, I nonetheless quite often overlook obvious points and make errors such as Sullivan makes here.
Temple math professor John Allen Paulos has made a lot of money over the years writing on this general topic, including Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1989) and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995). I commend both to you. They’re written at a very intuitive level so that even a non-stats geek can get the point.
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About James Joyner
Oh, I quite enjoyed the old, “How to lie with statistics” (not by the same author, but very interesting) and the somewhat newer, “How to lie with maps.”
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BTW, Paulos has a new book out concerning his (mis)adventures playing the stock market. Really good stuff on heuristics.
I enjoyed his explanation about the “anchoring effect” which applies beyond numeracy.
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Hey, give these journalists a break. they haven’t even been able to figure out that the Big Ten has 11 teams.
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Sullivan should refrain from having strong opinions about things he does not understand.
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So, GT, Sully should just shut down his blog, then? ;-)
I think your recommendation would spell the end of the entire blogosphere.
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Truth in Advertising
Apropos of the start of college football, I thought I’d offer this suggestion to my innumerate brethren and sistren in the sports news business: The Big Ten™ is not. The Big Ten Conference is an association of 11 world-class universities…
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