Quotes About Innumeracy

My own day-to-day observations confirm that many Americans can barely make change. At the supermarket where I buy groceries, I've watched more than one encounter at the cash register where both customer and clerk are befuddled at the prospect of double-checking the sums.

I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

I focus on the most important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy--that is, the inability to reason about uncertainties and risk.

This tendency to personalize is, as we'll see, a characteristic of many people who suffer from innumeracy. Equally typical is a tendency to equate the risk from some obscure and exotic malady with the chances of suffering from heart and circulatory disease, from which about 12,000 Americans die each week.

The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on an upswing.

Scope neglect and the identifiable victim effect encourage our intuitive innumeracy and lead to poor decision making. In contrast, most of us would endorse the goal of choosing behaviors—such as contributing money or investing our time—where we can do as much good as possible, rather than simply feeling like we made a difference.

Physicians don't do the best for their patients because they: practice defensive medicine (Self-defense), do not understand health statistics (Innumeracy), or pursue profit instead of virtue (Conflicts of interest).