The virus crisis is happening because there is a critical deficit of quantitative reasoning in our media & political class. Here, Brian Williams of MSNBC and Mara Gay of the NYT Editorial Board divide $500M into 327M to get...$1M?https://twitter.com/BadEconTakes/status/1235810967746793472 …
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If you can’t do division, if you think it’s a an “incredible way of putting it” and “true” that $500M/327M = $1M, then you won’t understand exponents, compounding, probabilities. This goes for elected officials too, by the way. Very little STEM.https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/03/06/msnbcs_brian_williams_new_york_times_editorial_board_member_mara_gay_five_divided_by_three_equals_one_million.html …
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What I’ve realized over the last few weeks is that you can’t give media and political elites an intuition for math and science overnight. Purely verbal people tend to discount any kind of exponential projection as unrealistic, *even if* shown data.https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/how-fast-will-the-new-coronavirus-spread-two-sides-of-the-debate …
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This is partly our fault too. The reason for the deficit of STEM in our media & political class is that people *with* that training have gone into tech or finance. Leaving the state to people who rule by gut and the press to art history majors with an ax to grind.
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It is entirely our fault. Those of us able to think mathematically benefit vastly from this advantage, and vastly prefer to keep it to ourselves; its scarcity makes it even more valuable, which elevates our status. Teaching what we know isn't just hard; it's self-abnegating.
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