re: #31 stabby

Speaking of mis-understandings and confusion about statistics, after reading many posts on ancestry and genetics forums it is so obvious that many, many Americans don’t really grasp either statistics or probability.

It’s not just Americans of course - all people are like this.

The modern world with its modern ideas - genetics being an excellent example - requires something of us who live in the modern world. Yet many don’t want to spend the time and struggle (and quantitative learning often involves struggle) with the hill to climb to reach the point where “understanding” is achieved, at least to an extent where one can start to make valuable judgements that can add to knowledge, either one’s own or for someone else.

This is one reason why I’m rather pessimistic these days - we just aren’t able as animals to learn enough and learn fast enough to keep up with the boundaries we are pushing. If we’re going to progress I suspect we’re going to have to re-engineer our genome to give us a longer life, better memories, and increased abstract thinking capabilities.