I'm fed up with the world (and the state of education in America), and am going to vent before I go do more useful things with my day.
I saw again the claim that "99.8% of unvaccinated people survive COVID-19", muttered from some innumerate half-wit.
I don't mean to make anyone feel bad, but I'm going to make some of you feel bad: a fully functioning adult should have sufficient numeracy to be able to dismiss that claim without ever looking up the SARS-CoV-2 infection fatality rate. The IFR is hard to measure (among other things, there is at least an order of magnitude difference between the IFR of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations)... but understanding why the .2% overall mortality rate claim is bullshit is something that every single adult who graduated from grade-school should be able to do.
Our K-12 education system hyper-focused on literacy and reading comprehension... and failed miserably. That same system focused not at all on basic numeracy, and the result is a population largely incapable of reasoning with numbers, even arithmetically.
A 7th or 8th grader(!) should be able to look at the ".2% overall mortality" claim and be able to show that it can't be true without positing wild conspiracy theories.
Leaving aside issues like the pandemic for a moment, and using a couple of examples less susceptible to conspiracy:
I’m willing to wager that a solid quarter of the country would accept a statement like “30 million Americans are lost to gun violence every year” without blinking.
I’m equally certain that a quarter to a third of Americans who bought soup on sale for 5 cans for 3 dollars could not (even with a calculator) tell you how much the soup cost per can.
Part of numeric literacy is having a general sense of the numbers in the physical world around you.
If I tried to persuade you that the moon is 350 miles away or that 30 million Americans are killed by gun violence every year, I expect a grown adult to have enough general awareness of the world around them to be able to reject those claims more or less instantly.
Many (I think) would claim that I’m holding people to too high of a standard, and it’s not reasonable to have intellectual standards for grown adults. I disagree.