wow, more than half..

That’s surprisingly self-aware, and encouraging.

Things change with time.

Back in the 70's I used to walk 20 miles as a child, and then go for farm work (not eveyday). As a mining engineer, I used to walk up 1.5 miles along a 1:3 incline (tunnel) everyday, sometimes during midnight, working 6-day week. Worked in dirtiest, noisy coal mines, near blast sites, soaked in black dust, with no place to sit during the shift. But never felt that it's something hard or bad, until some college kids, for who I was a tour guide, told me in horror that they wouldn't ever venture working in such place.

My boss laughs at that. He receives anonymous red-letter notes from the local extremist organization threatening him. He keeps a pile of those notes on a spike.

That's like ⅐ of the US population..

The question asked as part of the survey: “how well do you understand p-values?” Most scientists may not even be able to pass truthfully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_p-values

>> found that 62% of respondents reported no or limited statistical knowledge

The other 38% didn't understand the question...(my extrapolation)

I did a couple semesters of statistics at uni. And I can confidently say that the number of people who can answer 3 simple questions on statistics (like say mean versus medians, confidence levels or margins of error) is, well, a rounding error from 0.

Indeed, statistically, no-one has a clue how statistics work.

I did however learn enough to know that statistics can tell you absolutely anything you want them to say. Assuming you don't just make them up, they're trivial to manipulate to generate the headline you want.

When used to evaluate risk, the comprehension goes down further (a fact willfully exploited by any decent marketing.)

Statistically, most statistics are meaningless.

> The survey showed that 62% of U.S. adults self-report having little to no idea what statistics or statistical concepts like p-values are, but 90% of them would base decisions on reported statistics at least sometimes if they understood them better.

You're kidding, right? 38% self-report more than that? If their self-report were accurate it would imply an education system that has truly excelled.

> The bigger half of adults in the U.S. admit to lacking basic statistical understanding

FTFY

> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?

Is that a well designed survey question?

I would expect the use of a specific jargon term in that question to affect the results in a significant way.

What does it really mean to properly understand p-value? What I remember is that if the p-value is less than 0.05, the research result is considered statistically significant. That's about as far as my memory goes. I know that's actually a misunderstanding, but that's how most people understand it. I'm not sure how much I need to know to say I truly understand it.

> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?

I suspect that it’s far far less than 38% of people who actually understand statistics to this level. I suspect if someone on HN went around and asked their co workers to explain what a P value is in 2 sentences, it would be less than 10% of a (presumably) highly educated workforce.

I suspect about 40% of adults are unable to tell the difference between mean/median/ mode, or could answer the Monty hall problem, or even “if I flip a coin 3 times are the chances I get heads 3 times in a row”

I'd say in reality it's way more than that. The first statistics course in uni was a very humbling experience. I realised that while I thought I understood a lot (and I was coming from a CS heavy background, olympiads and such) real statistics is way harder and a lot more counterintuitive than I thought. Granted, this talks about "basic" statistical understanding, but even that is way more complicated than most people assume.

I love how they include statistics in the headline of a story about the lack of understanding of statistics. Epic troll.

100% of headlines of statistics-related articles must follow this rule.

This was abundantly clear when people, even on HN, were upset about the bureau of labor statistics revising their numbers tendentially downwards, probably confusing the notion of statistical bias for that of political bias.

If the figures are biased, just estimate the bias and correct for that, what is the big deal they said, as if the bias variance tradeoff was not a thing.