Lies, damned lies and statistics

While i cannot claim to have any expertise in the education sector, i can draw from my short working experience to say that a good education should enable a student to master the following life skills:

- Critical Thinking (to know when people are trying to smoke you)
- Competency in arithmetic/basic finance (finance skills to manage your own monies)
- Self-confidence (enables you to showcase the other skills you have picked up)
- Physical Fitness (basically so you can run to save your own life. or at least, to run across the platform at the train interchange/beat others in a sale)

of course, there are other skills like being respectful to others, ability to work under pressure, having social skills, leadership, but i just consider being respectful to be a basic part of human nature while the rest are only necessary in certain jobs.

i have never been much good at any of these skills, other than math (i am pretty bad at finances). i never though that math would be useful for anything other than passing exams, so it has never figured much on this list.  after all, Singaporeans often do well in Math Olympiads and yet employers always complain that our graduates are book-smart and not street-smart.

It is only this week however, that i have come to appreciate the importance of having sound arithmetic skills and at the moment i really feel very strongly about it.  i remember taking this module on statistics, which taught us how important it was to interpret/present numbers accurately, so that they do not mislead.  I remember reading books such as "How to Lie with Statistics", and coming away smiling at how people can use the same numbers to tell different stories.

i guess it can be pretty cute how numbers can look different from the scaling of a graph or from using percentages instead of absolute numbers.  We can still go ha ha he he i see what you did there.


sometimes however, people go too far and try to present a mathematical analysis in order to draw spurious conclusions.  a closer look of the numbers reveals that the basis of the calculations are all wrong, the numbers and assumptions used are off the mark and certain datasets were used just so that the desired conclusion could be reached.  Ok bad math.  in school, you get a F grade. In real life, it affects lives.

Whats more appalling is that, after this pseudo-analysis is presented, you get people saying things like: "Wonderful analysis, keep up the good work", or "Thanks for explaining everything so clearly".  I was so horrified that i felt like i was going to burst.  Could these people not see that this was rubbish?  Its bad enough that one dude goes bat shit crazy, now others are sucked in as well, not able to be discerning enough to analyse the numbers for themselves.  Worse still, others have to come in to clean up the mess, and at the end of the day, you get a whole bunch of unhappy people and lots and lots of time wasted.

Perhaps it is actually a lack of critical thinking, since it probably influences whether these calculations are done objectively or not. But ya, i have come to a new appreciation for math and hope that our education system can produce intelligent, discerning graduates who can think for themselves without being too easily influenced by others who are out to brainwash them.