this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
309 points (98.7% liked)

News

23387 readers
2941 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Americans now owe $1.13 trillion in credit card debt

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

At least when I was in school, one thing that kept getting hammered home was that people had difficulty understanding graphs. That I didn't see as being an issue, not unless you're talking about something pretty exotic, but if accurate, it seems like it'd be pretty limiting. And I've seen a lot of later articles also saying that a lot of people have trouble with graph comprehension.

googles

https://towardsdatascience.com/numeracy-and-graph-literacy-in-the-united-states-ea2a11251739

Last month, Alessandro Romano, Chiara Sotis, Goran Dominioni, and Sebastián Guidi surveyed 2,000 people to demonstrate that “the public do not understand logarithmic graphs used to portray COVID-19.”

They found that only 41% of participants could correctly answer basic questions about log-scaled graphs (v.s. 84% accuracy for linear-scale).

But the problem is harder than log scales. As you’ll see below, much of “the public” struggle with even the most basic charts and graphs, let alone complex visualizations.

I wish they'd had more statistics. In my high school, they had half a semester as an elective. In my university curriculum, it wasn't a core class (social science majors would study it, I would guess).

I have explained basic sampling to a ton of people on Reddit when polls came up, because they didn't believe that a sample of 1000 people out of a much larger population could result in a representative outcome. We see poll data all the time. Even if you never perform a poll, understanding the mechanism at least enough to trust it and understand when a poll might not be representative (e.g. self-selecting Internet polls). Confidence levels. I think I covered regressions in high school in an (elective) physics class, not even in a statistics class. That's a useful skill -- get a bunch of numbers, be able to produce a formula to predict more of them and get an idea of how accurate your model is. I assume that if you didn't take it or it wasn't offered, then you just wouldn't ever touch on them.