Innumeracy, Again

A lot of stupid things have been going through my head lately, and rather than encouraging me to post more often, it has shut me down.

First off, a shout out to my friend Mark Johnson. He posted the discussion we did a couple of months ago for his podcast. You can listen to it here: Boardgames To Go. It's a little over an hour long, and we talk about "classic" boardgames. We had a hard time coming up with a clear definition of a classic. We basically divided it into Ancient (Backgammon, Go, Chess, etc.) and modern (Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, etc.).

I listened to it again soon after it was published. After I got over the never-ending shock of what my voice sounds like on tape, I was surprised by the amount of things we delved into. I'm pretty proud of it, and if you are into the boardgame hobby like I am, I think it's worth a listen. It was definitely thought-provoking, as evidenced by the numerous comments Mark has received already.

Speaking of numbers, let's talk about that for a bit. The other day I was out for lunch. When my debit card receipt came to me, it had "Gratuity Guidelines 15% = xx" at the bottom. This bothered me. Not because it was blatantly asking for a tip, nor because it was suggesting 15% (although those did nag at me a bit).

No, it bothered me because it removed the "burden" of a simple math equation from the customer. I used to think those credit card-sized charts were bad; this was ridiculous. Really? Is 15% that hard? 10% and half again. Halfway between 10% and 20%. Are we really that afraid of having to do math? This frightens me, actually. I know it is just meant as a convenience, but I can think of a lot better things that could and should be streamlined for convenience.

I'll use this as a segue to another thing that's been bothering me for a long time: the number 1,000,000,000. That's a billion. Do you know how much a billion is? Apparently, most people don't. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. A billion minutes is 1900 years. There's some pictures out there that show a pallet of money, I think it's about a million dollars. I don't feel like finding it. Then they show a CGI image of that pallet multiplied by 1,000 to get a billion. For some reason, the scale of a billion being a thousand times more than a million gets lost on people.

This was most evident when the budget was released (yes, this has been bothering me a long time). The budget was something on the order of $840 billion. Then pundits and opposers and politicians came out and decried parts of the bill that cost a few million dollars. Some even complained about a program costing $80,000. Now, if you had $840.00 to spend however you liked, how would you feel about being criticized for how you spent four cents? I'm not saying that four cents couldn't be wasteful, but seriously, let's put things in perspective here.

But because of the massive innumeracy of our country, people get away with stuff like that. People on both sides. A billion is too large for most people to grasp, so their brain freezes and they don't worry about it. By an odd reversal, a million seems a little more comprehensible, so people get outraged when a million is misspent.

I have no idea what the solution is, but it just irritates me how often I see bad math and bad science popularized in the media. Don't even get me started about statistics.