Beyond a certain size, we lose the ability to intuitively understand numbers.

Examples? Sure:

1. how many people misunderatood the scale of the undertaking of trying to find mh370 in the ocean without any detailed guidance
2. how far billionaires are from the average person (i once argued that just having a comfortable home and a computer or cellphone put one comfortably in the top earners in the world - people dont understand the sheer scale of poverty or income inequality as it applies to the global situation)
3. how only the top ~100 atp/ wta tennis players actually make enough to comfortably cover basic tour costs
4. how absolutely vast the universe is. Voyager is slightly over a billion km from the earth rn, and it only means it has travelled a light day from the time it was launched

Feel free to add your own

Looking into it, it seems to be a bit too easy to just do the "haha, Americans are stupid" trope due to the nature of the survey. From what I could understand, the survey itself was a multi topical survey and only two of the questions submitted to the survey were about statistics and people's understanding of them and only one of the questions is directly about whether or not people understand statistics.

Ramos and his co-author, Samuel Anyaso-Samuel, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, submitted two questions that were used in this survey: “How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?” and “How often would you base decisions on reported statistics if you understood it better?” Ramos and Anyaso-Samuel analyzed the responses to these questions for this study.

I will be completely honest: if I was given those two questions out of the blue, I would probably answer somewhere in the negative even if I actually know what the p-value is practically.

Naturally, this is just perception of statistical literacy and not a measurement of actual literacy, but we contend that it is at least a meaningful indicator of how confident respondents feel engaging with statistical concepts.

Link

It is not the best survey to reference when it comes to Americans' statistical literacy imo, because it is essentially just one question that doesn't really explore the depth of knowledge people have with statistics. All it does is show that many people aren't sure they understand the concepts on the surface, which I think is completely normal and human to do. I doubt my own knowledge and understanding of things all the time. Even things I'm pretty comfortable with, I always assume, I don't know shit. I don't think I'm the only person who's like this. Far from it.

Should people feel more comfortable with the terms and does it show that there is a distance between everyday people and mathematical terms they don't hear everyday? Yeah. But is doesn't prove that Americans don't have statistical literacy. I can take you to where you need to go in my city, but I can't tell you the street names. They simply don't stick. Doesn't mean I don't know my way around town, tho.

Is it probable that some or even most of the people answering the survey are ignorant idiots who don't understand the basics of statistics? Yes. But if we ignore how and what the survey actually was and what types of questions were asked, then we are basically selfreporting, that we also don't understand statistics because we had a confirmation bias that made us not look into how the survey was conducted.

I say this as someone who has a very low opinion on America as a nation and who is also terrible at math. I just looked at the headline, read the article and clicked on the available link to parts of the survey to try and understand how they came to the conclusions they did. Because initially I assumed it was a test about people's understandings of statistics and that it was more in depth, but it's literally just one vague question in a mulit topic survey.

How many of you could fully explain how a p value is calculated (this may be the wrong sub to put this in, but I'll let my point stand)?

How much do you understand about statistics and p-values

I could tell you how it's used. I'd have to look up how to calculate it these days. I could tell you that's a shitty way to get to 67% of something using an ambiguous question that a high schooler could pick apart.

Shitty questions in, shitty conclusions out 🤷‍♂️

If that many admit it, just imagine how many more can't or won't.

It must be brutal to be the subject of an article you cant even understand the title of

Oh, and over 90% of 'facts' used in an argument are simply made up.