Statisticians vs. everybody else

Statisticians are literalists.

When someone says that the U.K. boundary commission’s delay in redistricting gave the Tories an advantage equivalent to 10 percent of the vote, we’re the kind of person who looks it up and claims that the effect is less than 0.7 percent.

When someone says, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm,” we’re like, Hey, really? And we go look that one up too.

And when someone says that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters . . . well, let’s not go there.

So, when I was pointed to this blog by Michael O’Hare making the following claim, in the context of K-12 education in the United States:

My [O’Hare’s] favorite examples of this junk [educational content with no workplace value] are spelling and pencil-and-paper algorithm arithmetic. These are absolutely critical for a clerk in an office of fifty years ago, but being good at them is unrelated to any real mental ability (what, for example, would a spelling bee in Chinese be?) and worthless in the world we live in now. I say this, by the way, aware that I am the best speller that I ever met (and a pretty good typist). But these are idiot-savant abilities, genetic oddities like being able to roll your tongue. Let’s just lose them.

My first reaction was: Are you sure? I also have no systematic data on this, but I strongly doubt that being able to spell and add are “unrelated to any real world abilities” and are “genetic oddities like being able to roll your tongue.” For one thing, people can learn to spell and add but I think it’s pretty rare for anyone to learn how to roll their tongue! Beyond this, I expect that one way to learn spelling is to do a lot of reading and writing, and one way to learn how to add is to do a lot of adding (by playing Monopoly or whatever). I’d guess that these are indeed related to “real mental ability,” however that is defined.

My guess is that, to O’Hare, my reactions would miss the point. He’s arguing that schools should spend less time teaching kids spelling and arithmetic, and his statements about genetics, rolling your tongue, and the rest are just rhetorical claims. I’m guessing that O’Hare’s view on the relation between skills and mental ability, say, is similar to Tukey’s attitude about statistical models: they’re fine as an inspiration for statistical methods (for Tukey) or as an inspiration for policy proposals (for O’Hare), but should not be taken literally. That things I write are full of qualifications, which might be a real hindrance if you’re trying to propose policy changes.

7 thoughts on “Statisticians vs. everybody else

  1. I think his next paragraph (after the one you quote) answers your question:

    "Writing and mathematics, on the other hand, count for a lot. So does drawing, and so does singing, even if most current workplaces haven’t figured out how to use them. …"

    Seems pretty easy to agree with that. The two problems I see with education are how schools handle the two ends of the learning continuum: rote learning, and theory.

    O'Hare's addressing the rote end of the spectrum, and as I understand it he's saying that inter-disciplinary projects help kids to learn in real-world, organic ways, and also helps motivate interest in the must-learn-by-rote topics because they're pursuing something that's interesting to them.

    My pet peeve is the other end of the spectrum: the theory end. As the old saying goes, if I had a dime for every time someone said, "I hate theory classes", I'd be rich. Many people (not including any of your readers, by definition) hate theory classes because the first "theory" classes they take are taught by people who don't understand the theory and who are deathly afraid of being unmasked by a 10-year-old, so they stick to the book and punish anyone who attempts to stray from the straight-and-narrow to gain clarification or to pursue something interesting. Combine that with poorly-written books which teach the topic in isolation and with no interesting examples and you've got a toxic mix. Kid's soon learn to keep avoid such classes and to hate "theory" as opposed to "practical classes".

    I think the answer at both ends of the spectrum, at least pre-college and perhaps pre-graduate-school, is an interdisciplinary, project-based approach. When I try to think through the how issues, it's not as easy as it sounds, but O'Hare does give an example of the kinds of projects (drama, video) they did in his school days and it sounds wonderful.

    (Sometimes, when I'm bored and have some time to kill, I think about how far one could take kids in mathematics if you motivated it in terms of estimation and puzzles. "How many bricks do you think are in this building? How would you estimate it?" Not sure if that would interest kids, to be honest, but you'd easily enter many realms of mathematics that aren't currently addressed until High School.)

  2. Not convinced (by O'Hare). I remember in Lafayette a couple of years ago, at the end of a visit to a restaurant, being fascinated as the guy drawing up our tab struggled hard, and failed, to do arithmetic that my eight year old son (educated in Germany) can do in his head. He eventually, after much effort, pulled out a phone and used the calculator mode. He did not seem overly embarrassed. My companion (a prof. of engineering at the Uni) was genuinely appalled, and I had to agree.

  3. I mostly agree with O'Hare [not about genetics, though]. Spelling is arbitrary and over-rated (I work in an office with many non-native English speakers, which colors this opinion). You need to know basic arithmetic very well, but adding long columns of numbers and even long division are tasks you don't need to know well.

    Similarly, in basic stat I spent a lot of time on calculational formulas for standard deviation, correlation, etc. These aren't completely useless, but not where you'd want to put the emphasis in the basic course.

  4. Been thinking about this given my daughter's first year calculus exam and this thing from one of the Wolframs http://www.ted.com/speakers/conrad_wolfram.html (not entirely clear if there is profit motive here?)

    But certainly a lot of the manipulative (reexpression) skills are now unimportant and obsolete?

    But rather than learning the must-learn-by-rote suff in interesting interdisciplinary projects, my guess was that it should be learned when young and not yet aware of the low probability of it ever being useful to them in their eventual careers.

    K?
    Spelling mistake ledft it on purpose this time ;-)

  5. Wayne – estimating the number of bricks was historically important

    For aiming the cannons – I used it as an example in an introductory statistics course. Multiple counters were sent out and those who returned alive usually had different counts. There was one general who decided to use the mode – as more people would count correctly than incorrectly.

    If I recall it got more in the way than it helped – (maybe because the expected _right_ answer was to take the mean).

    Also if you can honestly put your self back into the context without the theory solving these things is dreadfully hard and as Steve Stigler once put it – hard enough to attract the attention of those like Laplace and Guass. (We see them as easy and instructive because we have the theory.)

    K?

  6. Sean: Unsure if any one _should_ be appalled.

    Let me explain – but lets first remove being unable to access technology as a real concern – those old school teacher's warnings about being on a dessert island.

    I believe that physical and mental training are very (biologically) similar.

    A clear physical training mishap – one of the guys in the Oxford Boxing team worked out diligently on strength training over break with no access to punching bags or pads. The first day back at training on the pads he broke some bones in his hand. Neglecting to punch the bags while increasing other strengths was bad!

    Now is there similar mental stuff that will get imbalanced for neglecting to do mental arithmetic and all those others sorts of manipulations used in _old school_ pre-computational math?

    I don’t think so – but I am not sure.

    If I was sure the answer was yes, then I would be appalled.

    K?

  7. @sean: Reminds me of a story I heard years ago about someone who was in line at a shoe store and wanted to purchase some shoes which had some slight damage to them. The manager agreed to a 10% discount. At the register, the cashier searched and searched for the calculator and finally said in exasperation, "How can they expect you to calculate 10% in your head?".

    Mathematics is a language, and if you're not fluent enough, it's like trying to read a novel in a language you don't know by using a multilingual dictionary. You can plow through it, but you certainly aren't "reading" the novel in any meaningful way.

    It's not an original idea. but I really think that high school students need to demonstrate some level of estimation skills in order to graduate. (Basic, applied: geometry, algebra, probability, statistics, etc.)

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