Alan DiCenzo ·
Shared with Public
“Innumeracy” means illiteracy in mathematics, or, more honestly, illiteracy in arithmetic. The appalling degree of innumeracy in America today is to me one of our most effective methods for committing national suicide.
Let’s illustrate this monumental tragedy with an ironic and depressing example. I watched Fox News this morning (It might as well have been CNN; no matter) and learned that our national math scores, I believe for 9 year olds, declined by 6 points, and our national reading scores declined by 11 points. (I’ve forgotten the actual numbers, but these will be close enough for our purposes.) I’ve heard this same fact repeated in news story after news story, over and over by now, regardless of which TV channel I’m watching, and always with the same glib smoothness and calmness without any indication whatsoever that ANYBODY perceives the ABSURDITY of what they are all repeating like mechanical, sleeping idiots.
The absurdity of what they are all repeating in this way, is that it SHOWS ITSELF the very innumeracy they are complaining about in terms of the decline in scores. It could ONLY be in a country plagued so deeply by innumeracy that the very news networks charged supposedly with the crucially important task of giving quality news to adults, would keep sharing such a meaningless piece of information.
To say, e.g., that national reading scores declined by 11 points tells us virtually NOTHING at all. And we are all so INNUMERATE that apparently no one even notices or complains, whether the broadcasters themselves or the listening audience. To say “declined by 11 points” and with a dignified air to simply leave it at that, is like little kids in kindergarten talking on the playground and saying the same thing. That’s because we can have NO idea what that number, 11 points, means AT ALL, without some context or explanation. Doesn’t ANYBODY in this great country simply see that?
For that figure to be meaningful and convey ANY information at all, we’d need context and comparison, often in the form of ratios or the supplying of additional information to establish actual meaning and information content. Since none of this information was supplied, I’ll have to simply guess and make up some possible examples of what WOULD be meaningful conveyance of information when discussing numbers. So please let me do that here.
I might have some understanding of what the hell that number even means, say that 11 points, if I were told in the same news story that the total number of points possible in that measurement score was 1,000 points, say. But even that would hardly tell me anything meaningful or really revealing. I might understand then that the reading score declined about 1 per cent of its possible MAXIMUM value, but I still would not understand what that maximum value meant, or what the current average value for 9 year olds might be (837?) which declined by 11 points. A decline of 11 points relative to a notional average score of 837 would of course be somewhat larger than a 1% decline.
But even there we are not close to anything like full understanding. It might be still more useful to know that this average score of 837 was expected to go up by about 5 points per each year of age advancement under normal historical conditions. Thus, in two years, when 9 year olds would become 11 year olds, we would normally expect their raw “point” scores to go up from 837 to 847: That is, they would normally gain 5 points each year, for a total of 10 points over two years of age growth. Then and only then, we would be able to see that what this 11 points of loss really means is that our 9 year olds actually lost about two years, actually more than two years, of normally expected advancement in reading capability.
Now again, I just made up all these numbers. But the points I’m making should be clear. Only in a nation of mathematical CHILDREN, even among those aged 40 years or more, could news reporters blindly report the number “11 points” with apparent dignity and solemnity, without seemingly having the slightest idea of how absurd, ridiculous and meaningless spewing out that number in isolation really is. And only in such a nation of CHILDREN would it need to take a professional mathematician Ph.D. like me, to even point this out.
Come on man. This is ridiculous. We are terribly INNUMERATE. In reading, by analogy, that would be like having an entire population of adults who NEVER even learned to read. Are you SERIOUS? And you intend to complete with China and Russia and NoKo and Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua, or for that matter, Finland, like THIS? I can promise you, China would not DREAM of letting that happen to them.
I might say, only in a nation of such childish innumerates, could a President give a speech saying “MAGA Republicans are the greatest threat to our democracy” without the listeners (mass public) even realizing that all that that proves is that the President and his party THEMSELVES are in truth probably the greatest threat to democracy, and certainly not the MAGA Republicans toward whom he is spewing hate, and who also happen to be about as much as half the country.
“National reading scoresd declined by GAGAGOOGOOLULU!” Yeah, right, very dignified.
withthesongstillinsidethem 