Numbers Games

1. As John Allen Paulos and others have pointed out, many of us have trouble understanding even simple statistics and other supposedly high-school-level or early-college math.

2. It's famously easy to lie with statistics, especially if your audience has trouble decoding them.

3. The University of Pennsylvania's factcheck.org is supposed to catch lies in the news.

4. For all sorts of reasons, too often, they don't.

5. In any case, they are not math or stats professors, and aren't necessarily equipped to catch lies (or honest mistakes) involving math or statistics.

6. What to do? Where to turn? Who will explain numbers, or catch mistakes about statistics, in the news?

7. STATS.ORG will! George Mason Univ. prof Rebecca Goldin and her team of demystifiers and explainers appear to have devoted themselves to catching and fixing innumeracy in the news. Check it out: they appear to be only so-so at publicizing themselves, and yet really good at their job. The more people send potential math errors to them, and the more regular folks (not to mention reporters) rely on them to clear up math mystifications, the less deceived we'll be.

(Via Jordan.)