Here’s the BBC headline: “Covid-19 in Wales: A third of positive cases are unvaccinated.” * I guess we’ve reached the point of terminal nonsense, dare I say, terminal stupidity. Well, I suppose it was bound to happen, what with all the West’s educational alchemy motivated by “math is racist” and math is ethnocentric, and, for example, Oregon’s 82-page pamphlet A Pathway to Equitable Math instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction. ** Math ain’t numbers no more, kiddo.
But I suppose we’ve destined ourselves for number manipulation as a tool of ideology. You can read in Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction *** and in Kit Yates’s The Math of Life and Death **** that numbers, statistics in particular, are ideological tools and, sometimes, weapons. Definitely, tools of propaganda, also. Take that headline above. What did you infer upon reading it? That anti-vaxxers are paying the price of their anti-vaccine stance in their own phlegm?
Or did you infer by that BBC headline that in Wales TWO-THIRDS of COVID-19 cases are AMONG THE VACCINATED POPULATION? Why is the number given as it is for any reason other than to put some blame, some mark on the social standing of the unvaccinated. Could the BBC not just as easily have opened their story with the headline: “Vaccines Prove Ineffective, as Two-thirds of New Covid-19 Cases in Wales Demonstrate”?
Maybe the BBC reporter or editor “larned meth in Organ, teached by some racist.” Or maybe the BBC people just didn’t pay much attention in math class, concentrating instead on their “communication studies.” Here’s a line from the story: “Nearly 13% of hospital patients with confirmed Covid were unvaccinated.” But isn’t the point of vaccination, if not complete protection, then protection from hospitalization and ineluctable death? What is that 87% of hospitalized, but previously vaccinated, population supposed to think? That they wasted their efforts to acquire immunity?
No doubt the BBC headline will leave an impression in the minds of those pushing vaccine mandates, such as “elites” like Arnold Schwarzenegger and others who are vexed by the unvaxxed and who label the unvaxxed as terrorists and mass murderers. Are these unvaccinated people occupying hospital beds that could be used for victims of cancer and other diseases? But what about that 87% of hospital beds occupied by the vaxxed who are infected?
As someone who has been Pfizered twice, I have no problem with anyone’s choosing to get the vaccine, but I can understand those who choose not to be vaccinated. Some people just prefer to avoid medicines for various reasons; some specifically fear their effects: The J & J vaccine is a likely cause of about 30 cases of TTS with four deaths, so news of those vaccine-associated deaths weighs heavily on the minds of the unconvinced. ***** But statistically, four out of millions seems to be insignificant unless you are one of the four recognizing on your death bed that the vaccine you took to save your life was ending it.
If the general population is inadequately schooled in math, those four deaths plus some mixed messaging from health authorities and sensational reporting by the media will in the minds of the populace make vaccination seem as dangerous as the disease it’s designed to prevent. The way the Press handles numbers can have far-reaching effects. In addition, unanswered questions or confusing instructions make people frame their own answers in their amygdalae. Here’s a passage from a blog I wrote when two people with Ebola were transferred to the United States in 2014:
By the end of July, 2014 an outbreak of the Ebola virus killed more than 700 people in western Africa. Ebola sickened hundreds of others, including two American missionaries dedicated to helping the infected. Both Americans, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Whitebol contracted the disease. As I watched TV coverage of the ambulance deliver Dr. Brantly to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, I thought of the significance of “two.” In the American Press, reports on the Ebola Virus were generally tales of a distant land prior to the transport of Dr. Brantly. With the announcement of his transport to the United States and similar plans for Nancy Whitebol, the news coverage changed.
“Two” became, in the midst of 300 million people, more than just “two” in its potential to become, if not infinite, certainly indefinite. Fortunately, the transfer of Dr. Brantly seems, as of this writing, to have occurred without incident. But the transfer was done via plane and ambulance, and the ambulance traveled a highway in the midst of other vehicles. Just what if there had been a collision with another vehicle? The helicopter camera revealed what seemed like a normal traffic composition as a minivan with a carrier box paralleled the movement of the ambulance. Was there an unsuspecting family headed to summer vacation in that van in the lane next to the ambulance? Was the driver sleepy? What if the security system had been breached, potentially releasing the deadly virus into the general population? How would the significance of “two” have changed? Two people, missionaries, both dedicated to helping others, could, hypothetically by the accident of their infection and a breach in their isolation, unintentionally do indefinite harm. Would the disease spread geometrically, exponentially? ******
Nothing makes the heretofore meaningless more meaningful than personalizing it. Someone hears “four people died from the J and J vaccine,” and suddenly it becomes, “Oh! My gosh. I had that vaccine” or “Oh! There’s no way I’m going to get that shot.” We think with our flight, fight, or freeze brain, and not with the frontal cortex when matters appear to affect us directly. It’s easy to stand back and be contemplative when whatever is going on is going on elsewhere. What is personal is always meaningful. It’s easy to become pessimistic when a possible—not a probable—danger threatens.
And news media love to play on our fears; thus, the BBC headline above. Often the source of faulty guidance and fake news lies in the math accepted by the editor, reporter, or newscaster. Often, the math is faulty because it confuses absolute and relative numbers.
Let’s say you go to the doctor after a blood test, and the doctor tells you that according to the statistics, your blood test indicates that you have a 33% chance of developing a cancerous tumor. You panic. You’re one-third of the way to destruction, you think. But you also have a 66% chance of not developing any cancer. Why do you focus on the negative and not on the positive? Why did the BBC editor choose to say that in Wales a third of COVID cases occurred among the unvaccinated? Couldn’t that headline just as easily have been “In Wales, vaccines appear to be failing”? Couldn’t the headline have been “After millions of doses of J and J vaccine, only four people out of about 30 who developed TTS from the vaccine succumbed to the blood-clotting ailment”?
Here’s what Yates writes in The Math of Life and Death: “In medical trials one commonly sees positive outcomes reported in relative terms, to maximize their perceived benefit, while side effects are reported in absolute terms in an attempt to minimize the appearance of their risk” (p. 133). Yates points to the study of tamoxifen as a prophylaxis for breast cancer. The report revealed that those undergoing such treatment had a 49% decreased chance of acquiring breast cancer. That sounds good, right? But tamoxifen was associated with an increase in uterine cancer, a fact somewhat concealed in the use of absolute numbers: “Annual rate of uterine cancer in the tamoxifen [group of the trial] was 23 per 10,000 compared to 9.1 per 10,000 in the placebo [group].” (134) Hey, that’s not too bad; it means that only 13.9 additional women out of a population of 10,000 developed uterine cancer during the trial period, but 49% fewer women developed breast cancer. Percentages and absolute numbers: The sensationalizing media chooses whichever is the more frightening, whichever is better suited to support preconceptions and agendas.
Maybe the lesson here is that all of us could undergo a math review, specifically, a statistics review that will enable us to distinguish between what misleads our amygdalae and what informs our frontal cortex.
*https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-58680204.amp
**https://katu.com/news/local/debate-emerges-over-racism-and-white-supremacy-in-math-instruction
***O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. New York, Crown Publishing.
****Yates, Kit. 2019. The Math of Life & Death. New York. Scribner.
*****https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/575417-fourth-person-dies-from-rare-blood-clotting-syndrome-after-receiving-jj
******When “2 Is Infinite: Part One”
But I suppose we’ve destined ourselves for number manipulation as a tool of ideology. You can read in Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction *** and in Kit Yates’s The Math of Life and Death **** that numbers, statistics in particular, are ideological tools and, sometimes, weapons. Definitely, tools of propaganda, also. Take that headline above. What did you infer upon reading it? That anti-vaxxers are paying the price of their anti-vaccine stance in their own phlegm?
Or did you infer by that BBC headline that in Wales TWO-THIRDS of COVID-19 cases are AMONG THE VACCINATED POPULATION? Why is the number given as it is for any reason other than to put some blame, some mark on the social standing of the unvaccinated. Could the BBC not just as easily have opened their story with the headline: “Vaccines Prove Ineffective, as Two-thirds of New Covid-19 Cases in Wales Demonstrate”?
Maybe the BBC reporter or editor “larned meth in Organ, teached by some racist.” Or maybe the BBC people just didn’t pay much attention in math class, concentrating instead on their “communication studies.” Here’s a line from the story: “Nearly 13% of hospital patients with confirmed Covid were unvaccinated.” But isn’t the point of vaccination, if not complete protection, then protection from hospitalization and ineluctable death? What is that 87% of hospitalized, but previously vaccinated, population supposed to think? That they wasted their efforts to acquire immunity?
No doubt the BBC headline will leave an impression in the minds of those pushing vaccine mandates, such as “elites” like Arnold Schwarzenegger and others who are vexed by the unvaxxed and who label the unvaxxed as terrorists and mass murderers. Are these unvaccinated people occupying hospital beds that could be used for victims of cancer and other diseases? But what about that 87% of hospital beds occupied by the vaxxed who are infected?
As someone who has been Pfizered twice, I have no problem with anyone’s choosing to get the vaccine, but I can understand those who choose not to be vaccinated. Some people just prefer to avoid medicines for various reasons; some specifically fear their effects: The J & J vaccine is a likely cause of about 30 cases of TTS with four deaths, so news of those vaccine-associated deaths weighs heavily on the minds of the unconvinced. ***** But statistically, four out of millions seems to be insignificant unless you are one of the four recognizing on your death bed that the vaccine you took to save your life was ending it.
If the general population is inadequately schooled in math, those four deaths plus some mixed messaging from health authorities and sensational reporting by the media will in the minds of the populace make vaccination seem as dangerous as the disease it’s designed to prevent. The way the Press handles numbers can have far-reaching effects. In addition, unanswered questions or confusing instructions make people frame their own answers in their amygdalae. Here’s a passage from a blog I wrote when two people with Ebola were transferred to the United States in 2014:
By the end of July, 2014 an outbreak of the Ebola virus killed more than 700 people in western Africa. Ebola sickened hundreds of others, including two American missionaries dedicated to helping the infected. Both Americans, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Whitebol contracted the disease. As I watched TV coverage of the ambulance deliver Dr. Brantly to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, I thought of the significance of “two.” In the American Press, reports on the Ebola Virus were generally tales of a distant land prior to the transport of Dr. Brantly. With the announcement of his transport to the United States and similar plans for Nancy Whitebol, the news coverage changed.
“Two” became, in the midst of 300 million people, more than just “two” in its potential to become, if not infinite, certainly indefinite. Fortunately, the transfer of Dr. Brantly seems, as of this writing, to have occurred without incident. But the transfer was done via plane and ambulance, and the ambulance traveled a highway in the midst of other vehicles. Just what if there had been a collision with another vehicle? The helicopter camera revealed what seemed like a normal traffic composition as a minivan with a carrier box paralleled the movement of the ambulance. Was there an unsuspecting family headed to summer vacation in that van in the lane next to the ambulance? Was the driver sleepy? What if the security system had been breached, potentially releasing the deadly virus into the general population? How would the significance of “two” have changed? Two people, missionaries, both dedicated to helping others, could, hypothetically by the accident of their infection and a breach in their isolation, unintentionally do indefinite harm. Would the disease spread geometrically, exponentially? ******
Nothing makes the heretofore meaningless more meaningful than personalizing it. Someone hears “four people died from the J and J vaccine,” and suddenly it becomes, “Oh! My gosh. I had that vaccine” or “Oh! There’s no way I’m going to get that shot.” We think with our flight, fight, or freeze brain, and not with the frontal cortex when matters appear to affect us directly. It’s easy to stand back and be contemplative when whatever is going on is going on elsewhere. What is personal is always meaningful. It’s easy to become pessimistic when a possible—not a probable—danger threatens.
And news media love to play on our fears; thus, the BBC headline above. Often the source of faulty guidance and fake news lies in the math accepted by the editor, reporter, or newscaster. Often, the math is faulty because it confuses absolute and relative numbers.
Let’s say you go to the doctor after a blood test, and the doctor tells you that according to the statistics, your blood test indicates that you have a 33% chance of developing a cancerous tumor. You panic. You’re one-third of the way to destruction, you think. But you also have a 66% chance of not developing any cancer. Why do you focus on the negative and not on the positive? Why did the BBC editor choose to say that in Wales a third of COVID cases occurred among the unvaccinated? Couldn’t that headline just as easily have been “In Wales, vaccines appear to be failing”? Couldn’t the headline have been “After millions of doses of J and J vaccine, only four people out of about 30 who developed TTS from the vaccine succumbed to the blood-clotting ailment”?
Here’s what Yates writes in The Math of Life and Death: “In medical trials one commonly sees positive outcomes reported in relative terms, to maximize their perceived benefit, while side effects are reported in absolute terms in an attempt to minimize the appearance of their risk” (p. 133). Yates points to the study of tamoxifen as a prophylaxis for breast cancer. The report revealed that those undergoing such treatment had a 49% decreased chance of acquiring breast cancer. That sounds good, right? But tamoxifen was associated with an increase in uterine cancer, a fact somewhat concealed in the use of absolute numbers: “Annual rate of uterine cancer in the tamoxifen [group of the trial] was 23 per 10,000 compared to 9.1 per 10,000 in the placebo [group].” (134) Hey, that’s not too bad; it means that only 13.9 additional women out of a population of 10,000 developed uterine cancer during the trial period, but 49% fewer women developed breast cancer. Percentages and absolute numbers: The sensationalizing media chooses whichever is the more frightening, whichever is better suited to support preconceptions and agendas.
Maybe the lesson here is that all of us could undergo a math review, specifically, a statistics review that will enable us to distinguish between what misleads our amygdalae and what informs our frontal cortex.
*https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-58680204.amp
**https://katu.com/news/local/debate-emerges-over-racism-and-white-supremacy-in-math-instruction
***O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. New York, Crown Publishing.
****Yates, Kit. 2019. The Math of Life & Death. New York. Scribner.
*****https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/575417-fourth-person-dies-from-rare-blood-clotting-syndrome-after-receiving-jj
******When “2 Is Infinite: Part One”
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