Clive Thompson of WIRED published an excellent article on April 19, 2010, on the importance of understanding probability, coincidence, correlation, causation, snap-shot samples versus trendlines, anecdotal information vs statistically valid samples, and that it is just as important as literacy.
I’m quoting some highlights form the text:
“If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on — and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to. Statistics should now be a core part of general education.”
“Of course, as anyone with any exposure to statistics knows, correlation is not causation. And individual stories don’t prove anything; when you examine data on the millions of vaccinated kids, even the correlation vanishes.”
“There are oodles of other examples of how our inability to grasp statistics — and the mother of it all, probability — makes us believe stupid things. Gamblers think their number is more likely to come up this time because it didn’t come up last time. Political polls are touted by the media even when their samples are laughably skewed.”
“Granted, thinking statistically is tricky. We like to construct simple cause-and-effect stories to explain the world as we experience it. “You need to train in this way of thinking. It’s not easy,” says John Allen Paulos, a Temple University mathematician.”
“That’s precisely the point. We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can’t write, you can’t think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar.”
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/st_thompson_statistics/
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