On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse | Highlights and Annotations by Gistr.

This segment reveals the study's core findings: higher numeracy does not always lead to more accurate conclusions, especially when political ideology is involved. The presenter discusses how highly numerate individuals, when presented with data contradicting their beliefs, are significantly less likely to reach the correct conclusion than those with lower numeracy scores. This highlights the powerful influence of political beliefs on reasoning, even among those with strong analytical skills. This segment introduces a crucial element: political bias. The presenter explains how the same data presented in the context of gun control, instead of skin cream, dramatically alters the results based on participants' political affiliations. This demonstrates how pre-existing beliefs influence the interpretation of factual data, even among individuals with high numeracy skills. have that burden, and I think it would be a pretty different world and pretty extraordinary if we managed to figure that out.. -so what do we do about this? well, I don't think there is an easy solution, but Kahan has identified a few angles that might work.. one is avoiding partisan rhetoric. rather than talk about gun control or climate change, avoid the loaded terms and instead focus on specific local policies. no buzzwords that could trigger anyone into tribal thinking. no villainizing the other side, just constructive solutions that make sense given the data.. one example comes from Southeast Florida where a bipartisan group of lawmakers have joined together to take action on sea-level rise. the plans don't debate whether climate change is manmade or not.. they just deal with existing challenges faced by residents. the other thing is to foster a curious mindset. -maybe the science curious people, they're more willing to examine all the evidence, including information that's inconsistent with their political ideology. -with increasing science comprehension usually comes increasing polarization on political topics. but with increasing science curiosity, this same increase in polarization is not observed. that is a start.. I am not going to claim to have the solution.. problems of this sort are likely as old as the human species itself.. they are just much more obvious now that everyone can post, tweet, comment and basically shout loudly into this nearly infinite digital but if you look more carefully at the data and use proportional reasoning, you realize that in the experimental cream group, about three times as many people got better as got worse. but if you look more carefully at the data and use proportional reasoning, you realize that in the experimental cream group, about three times as many people got better as got worse. well about quantitative information. -numeracy scores for the entire sample were roughly normally distributed. now if you group together all the participants with a certain numeracy score, say group all the zeros together, all the ones together, all the twos and so on. well, what fraction of each group do you think got the skin cream question right? well, the results are exactly what you'd expect. -oh, this is math. -it's math. -in a fifth of the people, which is a smaller number--uh-huh. -the rash worsened, so the skin cream didn't help. -so it didn't make it better? -I feel the cream, if anything, made it worse. -[Derek] the higher the numeracy score, the greater the fraction of participants who got the answer right. -yeah. I don't think the numbers mean anything to me 'cause I think I need--that's a perfect answer. -I think I would need to know what's the rash and what's the cream you're giving me. -[Derek] those with better numeracy skills manage to avoid the intuitively correct answer. -what are the--just seems like proportions. -I've had nobody get into the numbers like this. this is great. excellent. you got that right. -okay. -and correctly determine that the cream actually made rashes worse, which is no big surprise. but this version of the skin cream question was only shown to some of the participants. another crucially, couldn't include fatal crimes, while the FBI statistics did. similarly, the FBI statistics couldn't include unreported crimes while the DOJ survey specifically does. so we're comparing apples and oranges here, which is the source of the disagreement. this kind of critical thinking is crucial to keeping our biases in check and so is personal accountability. ground news helps here too with data-driven insights from your personal news bias dashboard. this lets you track your own potential blind spots and biases so you can identify and correct them. check it out at groundnews.com/ve or scan this QR code. by subscribing through our link, you can get a 50% discount off the unlimited access vantage plan. this is their biggest discount of the year, and it's only available for a limited time.., you know,, Ground News is subscriber supported.,. So,