Numeracy
Increase your mathematical literacy by getting an embodied sense of mathematical concepts.
to make sense of the world—Comprehensive Sensemakers—mathematics is important. Arguments that you need to be able to assess often include numbers and mathematical relationships—Guarded Mind, and many of the phenomena you see in the world can be made more clear by mathematics.
Mathematics is one of the major tools we have to make sense of the world, yet many of us are unable to understand and work with numbers effectively.
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Numeracy is to mathematics as literacy is to literature. It’s the ability to understand and work with numbers on an everyday basis. We’re not talking about becoming a mathematician and thinking about obscure proofs; we’re talking about the practical stuff of basic math and probability.
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If you don’t have numeracy, you’re unable to understand the world fully. Like with most things, you’re probably numerate in some areas and less so in others. For example, you might be able to calculate a 15% tip at a restaurant, but not be able to understand how to calculate how much interest you’ll end up paying on a 5% mortgage over 30 years. Or you might be able to figure out how many 2x4s you need to build a wall, but not be able to assess the risk that you’ll die in an airplane crash, especially just after you heard about a couple of plane crashes on the news.
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I think numeracy, as important as it is in conducting day to day life, is most important when applying it to the news and current events. When you hear a report that some change in policy is going to effect only about 2% of the U.S. population, it’s good to be able to quickly translate that into a real number and realize that it will affect about 6.5 million people. You figure that out by knowing the current population of the United States and being able to do some fairly simple math in your head: at the time of this writing, the population of the U.S. is about 330 million people; 1% of that is 3.3 million times 2 (to get 2%) is 6.6 million.
Therefore:
Work to increase your numeracy (or “mathematical literacy”) by getting comfortable with reading equations and getting an embodied sense of mathematical concepts that are fundamental to understanding how the world works, like exponential growth and the power law.
A close cousin of mathematics is Logic.