My Impressions: Innumeracy

The title intrigued me.  Often times we hear people throw out illiteracy a lot, but not so much innumeracy.  As someone who tries to be precise and accurate, the frequent inaccurate claims make me uncomfortable.  I tend to take communication very literal and numerical.  If I could, I would even try to group my communication thoughts in a binary way: yes or no, black or white.  Not always a good idea to do that, but there is some appreciation to see I’m not the only one like this.

In a world where overemphasis and exaggeration is focused on very select topics while everything else is being masked, our inherent expectations on how the world operates is also constantly changing unconsciously.  Further adding to this is the constant bombardment of our self-select filters in social media.  Parts of this book provide big data results on situations we may be way off.  I think this is important because it helps realign our benchmarks…  And if our expectations were way off “reality,” then we can finally start asking questions again, being truth to oneself, and the world we live in.  

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

The book wasn’t as nerdy as I expected.  I would label the exercises and tricks in the book in two labels: The easier level and the harder level. 

The easier level consists of cute tricks that appear often in intro-math courses or brainteasers online.   An example would be what are the chances of two people having the same birthday in a room full of people?  Questions similar to this often have answers that are very different from “most people’s” expectations, and the math is easy enough to kind of get it. 

The more complex questions walk through some calculations – like in school we have to “show our work” to demonstrate our thought process and how we arrived to our answers.  I assume most people for the most part would just be bored and skip right over………  Then there are some parts I would think of as more “philosophical” like whether extraterrestrial beings exist, or, if we each share Julius Caesar’s last breathe, and try to use math to calculate an answer.  At that point, I’m still kind of curious, but more at “Ok, so what?  Who cares?” 

One important mention in the book is we were taught basic math in grade school, but we were never taught how to apply them.  If we stop and think about that for a second, and really think about all the other subjects we were taught and if we could apply them in real life…  The thought scares me.  Of course, there is the easy blame – the education system.  But the same time, we should also be responsible for our own education, shouldn’t we?  Nobody has responsibility over our own learnings and maybe we should take more ownership of it. 

Yeah, this is an odd post.  I’m just going to stop abruptly because my thought process just shut down.