Innumeracy - Mathematical Illiteracy
Innumeracy is the inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance.
A lot of people nowadays tend to think that mathematics are useless for the everyday life. Some of them even express a perverse pride when talking about their lack of mathematical abilities. And unlike other failings which are often of a more subtle nature, mathematical illiteracy is oft flaunted as seen in these common phrases: "I always hated math", "I'm a people person, not a math person", "how will this be of use for me in the future?".
A reason why innumeracy happens is because its consequences aren't as easy to see as other weaknesses. Moreover, some of the blocks to dealing comfortably with numbers and probabilities are due to natural psychological responses to uncertainty, coincidence, or how a problem is framed. For instance, the fear of death-by-shark-attack. How we point our focus to the scant yearly annals, while ignoring the rest of the statistics.
Even more ominous is the gap between scientists' assessments of various risks and the interpretation of the layman. This gap threatens eventually to lead either to unfounded and crippling anxieties or to impossible and economically paralyzing demands for risk-free guarantees.
Hereinafter, I will expose an example regarding the risk of contracting AIDS heterosexually, with the intention of demonstrating the importance of being conscious of statistics.
The chance of getting AIDS in a single unprotected heterosexual episode form a partner known to have the disease is about one in five hundred. Thus, the probability of not getting it in such an encounter is 499/500. If the risks are independent, the probability of not getting it after two consecutive encounters is of (499/500)^2, and after N encounters (499/500)^N. Since (499/500)^346 = 1/2, one runs about a fifty percent chance of not getting AIDS in unsafe heterosexual intercourse everyday for almost a year, with a person known to have the disease.
Using a condom, the risk of being infected from a single heterosexual episode with someone known to have the disease goes down to 1/5000. By similar reasoning as the above, we conclude that having safe sex everyday for ten years with such a person leads to a fifty percent chance of getting the disease.
If you don't know whether or not your partner has AIDS, the chance per episode of getting infected is one in five million unprotected. One in fifty million using a condom. We therefore conclude that you are more likely to die in a car crash on the way home from such a tryst.
It is noteworthy to see that the reasoning mentioned in the above paragraphs does not encourage people to secure themselves more or less; it is simply stating that you need to be aware of numbers, probabilities, and their semantic connotations.
**NOTE: the ideas mentioned in this text were extracted form the book "Innumeracy" by John Allen Paulos. Nonetheless, they were not copied and pasted.
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