Slashdot Mirror
Is Poor Numeracy Ruining Lives?
Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports on how millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill. Government figures show that almost half the working population of England have only primary school math skills, and research suggests that weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness. 'We are paying for this in our science, technology and engineering industries but also in people's own ability to earn funds and manage their lives,' says Chris Humphries. He is the chairman of National Numeracy, an organization seeking to emulate the success of the National Literacy Trust, which has helped improve reading and writing standards since it was set up nearly 20 years ago. The Department for Education wants the vast majority of young people to study math up to 18 within a decade to meet the growing demand for employees with high level and intermediate math skills. 'It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say "I can't do maths,"' adds Humphries. "
If you can't multiply / divide , you can't run a business.
If you don't know anything about combinatorix (odds), you get suckered by any form of gambling, including insurance, warranties and the stock market.
If you don't understand exponential math, you can't become wealthy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Don't know about Numeracy - but numerology ruined my life. Fortune cookie told me 05 14 46 52 56 were my lucky numbers. I ran up huge credit card debt expecting to win the lottery with these numbers... then I found out fortune cookie didn't give me the powerball number.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
That many people are proud of their innumeracy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The generally poor understanding of numbers on the part of others adversely affects my life as well. Not only to the extent that they make poor decisions for themselves, but from the way they make poor decisions on my behalf. Damn politicians.
uneducated != stupid
Life is hard; it's harder when you're stupid.
That distinction doesn't exist in the broader use of the English language, and it doesn't freaking matter. It was clear to everyone what was meant.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
A large part of the problem is that if they got math at all then it was part of the track to the physical sciences (algebra -> algebra 2 -> calculus -> differential equations).
Voters who aren't in a physics-based career need math, but not the same branch of it. Statistics is critical. Understanding what correlation means and what it doesn't, what a control group is for, recognizing sample bias, and definitely the base rate fallacy are all vital for resisting propaganda.
Cashiers used to be expected to be capable of some basic arithmetic, but not so anymore.
It used to be that they would confirm the change amount by adding it up from the owed amount to the paid amount. Now, they just pile the change on top of the bills and silently try to slide it onto your hand, which invariably results in some of the precariously piled change falling onto the counter.
And if, after they've rung it in and had the cash register tell them how much change to give, you try to give them a little extra change so that they'll give you back a nice round bill instead, then they'll just stare at you like you're trying to pay with live snails.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
My eldest son is a whiz- he's a couple years ahead and should get through AP Calculus and Stats by the time he gets through HS.
On the other hand we adopted 5 girls from foster care and it is a STRUGGLE. I don't know how much of it is organic (all of them were exposed to drugs/alcohol in utero) and how much of it is early formative, but they all have incredible difficulty making the most basic inference or deduction or story problem. I'm really concerned for them because I forsee them potentially running into the roadblocks referenced by the article summary. But there are in fact SOME excuses for saying "I can't do maths." Some people may never be able to master the basics no matter how hard they try.
Not to say we are in any manner giving up. They get extra tutoring at school and spend hours doing homework, despite being in elementary school, but different people have different top levels of achievement and sometimes that level is below what any of us would like.
Waste of mod points, but: that is completely proper British English, you insensitive clod. This is an article written in the UK.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Some of that isn't the cashiers fault. It's amazing how many people get confused if you try to count back change like that now.
On the other hand, I've seen some registers that instead of showing change due as $14.68 will show
1x$10
4x$1
2x$.25
1x$.10
1x$.05
3x$.01
Except with pictures of the coins and bills.
Millions of people struggle to understand. Whatever. We do remember that we come from a times when there was no math around at all, right? So how much time do we spend being happy abouth the fact that millions of people do understand a payslip or a train timetable? Making fuss about these millions without context shows poor skills in philosophy and can ruin lives.
Some important questions to ask around these skills and the millions are here:
How many and much total skills do people have?
Is the total going up or down?
Is the relative amount of math skills in this total going up or down?
What are the other skills that might be replacing or being replaced by math skills?
Which skills should be priorities? For which professions?
FCKGW 09F9 42
No, and while the GP was a troll, there is a point to be made here –the problem in the UK is that people don't want to be educated in maths. There's a large segment of society that thinks that it's good to be numerically illiterate. They wear "I don't know maths" as if it's a badge of honour. That is stupid.
Innumeracy is what keeps the mythology of supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve alive.
The usual Laffer curve argument doesn't even rely on innumeracy, it relies on the inability of those to be indoctrinated to do basic logic. Has anyone actually *seen* this fabled curve? All you get is the trivial cases of no revenue at 0 and 100% tax rate, and, ergo *jedi hand wave*, we must lower taxes. If you do actually plot revenue against rate for different countries, you get a complete mess which you cannot fit against any meaningful function. That is not the purpose anyway, the whole Laffer curve argument relies on that Jedi hand wave.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Here in America we have it easy - we only have to learn one math, not an entire "programme" featuring an assortment of "maths".
My college career was greatly aided by the fact that many of these people will play poker for money.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Why not a combination of factors? This isn't really a black-and-white thing.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I come from the UK and personally find mathematics pretty difficult. I can work through problems on paper but my mental arithmetic is atrocious. By the time I two operands and an operator in my head and have broken up the problem into a simpler problem, I have forgotten the original two numbers...
That said, mathematics should come the more you practice. I like to blame the school curriculum -- it is shit. The only reason why I am valuable is because I acquired computing skills playing on computers as a child.
I'd like to blame mathematics textbooks but I cannot. My generation and a few before me have lost the willpower and motivation to actually study and learn things properly. Our education system does not really promote mathematics that well. My school staff was rife with young twenty somethings fresh out of university with no real ability to teach...
Teaching has lost its respect and professionalism in the UK too. Add to the fact it became okay and even cool to be ignorant in modern culture.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Unfortunately, while we used to have separate exams for arithmetic and mathematics, the powers that be decided that the best way to narrow the gap between low achieving inner city schools and high-achieving middle class schools was to merge the many different exams into single subjects; arithmetic and mathematics became general mathematics; physics, chemistry, biology and APH became general science.
Back 30 years, there used to be adverts on TV at every lunch-time to help people with literacy and numeracy skills, titled "On the move". They just mentioned a hotline anyone could call to arrange an appointment with an adviser (information pack or application forms wouldn't be much use). These days, it's cheaper for employers to employ East Europeans with English as a second language.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That's arithmetic not math!
That's akin to saying "That's physics not science!"
"Mathematics can, broadly speaking, be subdivided into the study of quantity, structure, space, and change (i.e. arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and analysis)."
So yes, arithmetic is math
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
All you get is the trivial cases of no revenue at 0 and 100% tax rate, and, ergo *jedi hand wave*, we must lower taxes
It is a consequence of three things, the assumption that revenue as a function of tax rate is continuous (loosely, that small changes in tax rate mean small changes in revenue), the above assumption that there is zero revenue at 0 and 100% tax rate, and Rolle's Theorem. The combination of those three things yields the Laffer curve. The theorem is unassailable. That means one of the two assumptions have to be wrong before the Laffer curve model is wrong.
You aren't really complaining about the Laffer curve, but rather about a rhetorical and unwarranted jump from existence of the curve to deciding that tax rates must be lowered. That only would be true, if a) the current tax rate is above the optimal rate, and b) maximizing or increasing tax revenue is a primary goal, neither which was established in your example.
It doesn't help that figuring out what the Laffer curve looks like is extraordinarily hard. For example, there's no reason to expect that the Laffer curve for the US and Sweden would be the same. The primary reason just being the relevant effectiveness of public spending in each country. The US is remarkably less effective at spending public funds (at all levels of government) than Sweden is.
So one would expect that a lower tax rate would be more effective in the US for increasing overall revenue (that is, private sources are more effective at increasing value and future revenue relative to public means in the US than the same in Sweden). And actual tax rates (including state and local levels) in the US are usually lower than those in Sweden.
This is terrible thinking. You're right, the cashier doesn't have to know anything about arithmetic to give out change - unless they accidentally hit the wrong button the register. Which they do. Because fingers are fat and slow, and registers are dumb machines. So when the cashier hits $10.00 instead of $20.00 for the bill I gave him, I want him to know enough math to give me an extra $10 in change - since that's what he owes me. If you think this is a trivial example, manage some cashiers sometime. A quarter will correctly adjust (correctly) instantly, a quarter will simply not notice and give a person too little (or too much) change, and half will realize they hit the wrong button, stop, panic, and call someone for help to sort it out.
Woman: Give me 8 QuickPick tickets ..
Cashier: That'll be $16 ....
Woman: OH! give me three more.
Cashier: That'll be $22
Woman: Hmm give me three more..
Cashier: $28
Woman: Try 3 more. Cashier: (exasperated) How much do you want to spend???
Woman: $40
Cashier: so you want 20 tickets
Woman: If I have enough money yes, give me 20..
"weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness"
How about this for an example of bad math? Researchers post an article making the age-old mistake of equating correlation to causation.
A quantity that grows at a constant rate grows linearly. A quantity that grows at a rate proportional to its value (which is necessarily not constant, unless it is zero) grows exponentially. What you describe is something like x-dot = c, which is linear growth. Something like x-dot= c x is exponential. (if you are familiar with the symbols from calculus). I wouldn't go as a far as calling you a "stupid fuck", but what you are saying about constant rates is incorrect.
I'll nip this in the bud and post something similar here to what I posted in the thread which drooling-dog referred to.
"Rate" is ambiguous. You can have a fixed rate of acceleration, which means linear growth; you can also have a fixed interest rate, which means exponential growth. Neither is really any more correct than the other, and the meaning of the phrase "constant rate" is very hard to interpret without any context to indicate what is meant by it.
I suggest you have never met a mathematician - it is a sure identifying characteristic that they can't do arithmetic.
Just like Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, and Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, it is also the case that Real Mathematicians Can't Do Arithmetic.
A Real Mathematician knows about the number zero, and several different versions of the "number" infinity, and can probably cope with the number one on a good day, but any other numbers are arithmetic, not maths, and far too applied to be worthy of their attention.
I have a maths degree, but completely screwed up some basic arithmetic recently. Arithmetic is, as you said, a branch of mathematics, but it not the sum total (pun intended) or even a necessary part. Rather than equating it with not knowing the letters of the alphabet, I'd liken it to being unable to spell:
Good spelling, while useful in every day life isn't nearly as important as being able to write well and understand complex texts; a computer can help you with spelling. Similarly in maths, good arithmetic can be useful in life in speeding things up a bit, but with calculators on every phone and computer it isn't crucial. Whereas the important bits of maths (analytical thinking, the rigours of proof, reasoning, deduction etc.) are much harder to get a computer to help with, and are much harder to spot in oneself if not present.
It doesn't really matter if people can't remember how to do long division or multiplication by hand; what matters is that they find out/work out how to do so when needed. Given that, the OP's point does have some validity, and is not merely pedantic. That said, the title mentions "numeracy", not mathematics.
Of course, the real problem seems to be not that people cannot do maths (which, anecdotally, ime, they usually can when given encouragement and a few pointers), but that they're being taught to answer maths test questions, rather than understand the principles behind the problems; as such, it's easy to forget the specific methods, and hard to work them out later when needed. Sadly this seems to be a problem across much of the UK education system.
Aristotle pointed out that one's capacity for virtue is limited by one's intelligence.
To put it simply: if you truly want to do the right thing, but you are so uneducated that you can't figure out what the right thing is, you wind up not doing the right thing. The thing you actually do is one of the wrong things, and so it is probably harmful to someone.
Even if the soul of such a person is as pure as untrodden snow, the actual outcomes of their actual actions are equivalent to those of a morally inferior person.
When a person is in a position that his actions could harm others (such as, say, an airplane pilot who’s actions could crash the plane), that person is morally obligated to attain and maintain a high level of competence. However, since we all live as part of an interconnected society, we are *all* in this position. Any action we take could harm others if not thought through, so lifelong self-education is a moral imperative for all of us.
Everyone has genetic limits to intelligence, and limits on opportunities for education, which are forgivable. When you hit those limits and need to make decisions that are beyond them, the morally correct thing to do is seek guidance from someone who is more appropriately educated.
If you do neither; if you insist on remaining ignorant and on directing your life based on this ignorance, then you harm everyone around you. You are therefore guilty of negligence, and therefore you are a bad person.
Well, if tax rates are 100% then there is no disposable money left, so no economic activity and no tax revenue
No economic activity at 100%? The citizenry may not be spending money but the government will still be doing so; if the money is not spent it will be a meaningless concept. If in this hypothetical situation the government spends the money to to cater adequately for all citizens needs (i.e. the nation becomes an utopian socialism), then there is in theory no problem. It is not necessary for the government to spend the money itself, it is perfectly possible for the government to give every citizen an allowance to spend according their wishes. Don't ask for examples; this is just a rebuttal of the quoted statement, which is not 'obviously correct'. I appreciate it might make more sense in the context of monetarist economics. But that comes with a whole load of preconceptions, which you have taken for granted.
I worked at Wendy's through high school, so I have some experience with cash registers and handling those small amounts of cash. I also have a degree in math - simple arithmetic has never been an issue for me. That quarter of people who adjust quickly were either paying extra attention to you for some reason, or were new at their jobs. Handling a cash register is a simple, repetitive task so your brain quickly makes a habit out of the normal transaction and you do it unconsciously. When someone tells you you've made a mistake your brain turns off autopilot and dumps you into a situation you haven't really been aware of. They shouldn't need to call for help, but it does give you a moment of panic, like walking in the front door of your house and not remembering the trip home because you weren't really paying attention. That moment makes it look like you don't know what you're doing, but that isn't always the case.
I spent a summer working a register, and I can tell you that while at the start of the summer I could make change in my head fairly quickly and accurately, something about the mental state of using the register to figure change absolutely ruined that faculty. Took a couple of months for it to return in the fall.
This. Basic statistics education for the win.
There used to be a thing in classical education called the "trivium". It's the origin of our modern English word "trivial", and the latter got its meaning because the trivium was considered the basic groundwork that every educated adult was expected to know already. It consisted of three subjects: grammar, (propositional) logic, and rhetoric. We only bother trying to teach the first of these to people today, and generally let them reach adulthood without having really mastered even it.
I think that these three "trivial" subjects should not only be reinstated, but they should be paired with comparable mathematical subjects which should be considered equally trivial requirements for any adult: arithmetic, (elementary) algebra, and statistics.
In primary school, kids should learn their grammar and arithmetic, and be capable of accomplishing basic tasks with words and numbers, writing and understanding qualitative and quantitative statements.
In middle school, kids should learn their elementary algebra and propositional logic, and be capable of meaningfully converting qualitative and quantitative statements between each other, seeing how words and numbers relate to each other in a more abstract way.
In high school, kids should learn statistics and rhetoric, to be able to persuade people with both words and numbers and, even more importantly, to avoid being mislead by others attempting to do the same.
Trigonometry, calculus, and all the more advanced mathematics are awesome and may be necessary depending on what you want to do, but are not necessary just to function in the world. Likewise predicate and modal logics and all the more complex variations on those; anyone who argues for a living (i.e. most politicians, lawyers, etc) should be required to understand them as much as a physicist needs to know calculus, but normal people can get by well enough without them.
But grammar, arithmetic, elementary algebra, propositional logic, rhetoric, and statistics... those are just... trivial.
Or, I guess, "sexial". Which might help sell it? Support sexium education today! It's the other "sex ed"!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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they really couldn't understand that I could easily a number from 100, and thought there must be some secret trick.
I see you perform the same secret trick with English too!
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