Spencer and David Bloomberg explore how humans intuitively grasp math in survival tasks—like catching a ball—but fail with abstract concepts like volumes, large numbers (e.g., COVID death tolls), or statistics (e.g., misinterpreting 2% mortality as harmless). They critique media’s detached use of data, such as ivermectin’s toxic-dose inefficacy, and contrast anecdotal claims (e.g., Rogan’s endorsements) with deadly anti-vaxxer Twitter trends. Math literacy, they argue, is essential to resist manipulation and improve decision-making across all professions. [Automatically generated summary]
The podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And again, today, back with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good, good.
How are you?
Oh, very good.
Very, very happy today with the topic we're going to talk about.
We want to talk about math.
You ready for math?
Is anyone ever really ready for math?
Oh, math is my favorite subject.
I could do math all day, every day.
I prefer it to people vastly, but I mean, at least in math, at least in math, you have solid answers.
True.
Yeah.
I try to get that across to my wife all the time.
I don't want to get in the middle of that one.
Yeah.
Great.
So before I endanger my marriage further, let's move into math.
Why do I want to have an episode about math?
Aside from the fact that I love it and no one else seems to.
Well, really, the point of this isn't just to talk about math.
It's to understand that there is math that we're good at and there is a math that we're not good at.
And I don't ever see anyone talking about this.
The fact that there are some things that you will just sort of understand on an intuitive level, and there's a bunch of other things that you're just not going to be any good at.
You're just going to, they're just going to go right over your head.
And you might even think that you're good at them, but you're just not.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say when you mentioned, you know, there are some things we know at an intuitive level.
I think that there are some people who believe that they understand all math on an intuitive level when they clearly don't.
When they clearly don't.
Yeah, it's just not possible.
Some things are just not possible to understand on an intuitive level.
And we're going to try to hit that today.
So where am I in my notes?
I don't know.
I had to switch to a completely different note set because I thought you had messaged me and said we were talking about meth.
Oh, you're ready to talk about meth today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, let's do the breaking bad episode some other time.
Yeah.
So I see a lot of memes, internet memes that talk about the attempt to talk about the value of math.
Most people's experience with math is what they learned in high school and the years before high school.
And some of them attempt to say, well, all that math wasn't that important.
It never really helped me in my life.
I pretty much got by without it.
I never really needed it.
All that time was wasted time.
It certainly doesn't help me do my taxes, which would have been much more important knowledge for me.
And I agree, you know, walkthrough of how to do your taxes would have been good for everyone in grade 12.
Maybe they do it now.
I don't know.
I don't think so.
No.
Well, at least no.
Not that I've ever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
But I need to say something important, which is that math is the most important area of knowledge in our lives.
It makes everyone better at everything that can be done.
If you were to rewind the clock, everyone at every job, if you were to, you know, if you were God and you could, you know, do all the what-if scenarios, if everyone who did a job, you rewound the clock and you remove their knowledge of math and then you let the universe continue from that point, they would be irreversibly worse at that job.
Every single job, every single person.
No one can escape this effect.
It makes everyone better at everything.
And the more complicated your job is, the more it's boosting your ability to do it.
The greater the difference between your ability with it and your ability without it.
If you're doing an extremely simple job, it's still improving you, but just not by nearly as much.
But the world is not a simple place and it's not getting simpler.
It's getting more complicated.
The number of jobs that will be improved by math has increased greatly over my lifetime and will continue to increase into the future.
That there's no way around that.
We're not becoming simpler again.
Yeah.
Not without some kind of catastrophe.
Yeah.
And I've, you know, I've worked a number of jobs.
I mean, I, you know, as much as I joked about math, you know, I am recently retired as an engineer.
So obviously I had to deal with a lot of math over the years, both in school and after.
But, you know, you mentioned any job, you know, well, during high school summers, I worked in a warehouse to earn some money as a summer job.
And, you know, I still clearly remember times when the warehouse manager would be like, okay, we need to get, and it was welding rod.
So you had to get boxes of welding rod, load them onto the truck.
And he was like, okay, here's the order that we need to get onto this truck.
And he'd be sitting there punching away slowly at his calculator.
And I'd be like, yeah, we need five boxes of this, six boxes of this, and two boxes of this.
And he'd be like, how did you do that?
I'm like, it's math, you know?
And so, yeah, even something, you know, you, you know, that I was, you know, getting paid minimum wage at that time to, you know, lug boxes of welding rod around.
And, and, uh, you know, even then, you still need to know, or else you're going to get the order wrong.
Right.
So I think the first thing to point out is that the human brain has a sort of a computational engine has some things that it's very good at in this regard.
And most of those things have to do with simple comparison, one thing compared to another, because that's mostly what your brain is doing isn't number work.
It's not arithmetic.
It's true math.
And I draw that distinction carefully.
Arithmetic, when you're doing math, math is done with symbols and with concepts.
Arithmetic is the part that happens at the end with the numbers where you're plugging numbers in to get an exact value.
And most of what your brain is doing isn't that.
It's not arithmetic.
So a lot of people have trouble with arithmetic when they probably actually would be pretty good at math.
And I have seen this situation.
And it makes me kind of disheartened that when we're growing up, when we, you know, first, second, third, fourth, fifth grades, we're learning arithmetic and some people aren't good at it.
And they get this idea over those years of grinding that they won't be good at math and never try it.
And that breaks my heart a little bit because you don't need to be good at arithmetic to be good at math.
There's a large number of people that think they're bad at math and are actually pretty good at all the concepts that you need to have.
And I don't know what to do with that.
Like I can't go talk to the teachers union and talk to them about it and say, look, you got to change this right now because obviously they won't listen to me.
I'm just some guy from the internet.
But this is a thing I've tried to point out to people is that arithmetic is part of math, but it's not even close to all of math.
And increasingly now, the arithmetic is being handled by machines.
Machines are much better at arithmetic than we are.
And so knowing arithmetic doesn't gives you less of an advantage in these places.
But knowing the math gives you still all the advantages as it had before, sometimes more, because you now have a computer at your disposal to do all the arithmetic for you and you don't have to worry about that part.
So in thinking about this as comparisons and what we're naturally good at, I've come up with some everyday examples of some things that mostly we're bad at, actually, when I looked at them and I saw most of these things are things we're not good at, but they're demonstrations of how we need to have actual real mathematical concepts to work around the things that we're just not good at.
Because we would never be living in these wonderful homes with the internet to connect us without math.
So before I get into this, do you have anything extra to add here for this?
No, I'll wait a little bit.
Sure.
All right.
I'll plug in my X value afterwards.
Yeah, yeah, the independent variable.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll make sure I'm integral to the conversation at that point.
Good.
Math puns.
I like it.
So in looking at math that we're good at, there's some mathematical equations that Isaac Newton came up with, among many things that Isaac Newton did, to exactly calculate the arc of a thrown ball as it moves through the air.
And when you look at them, especially the first time you look at them, they're fairly complicated.
Once you've kind of worked through them and you're comfortable with them, they're pretty okay.
But most people will point out that they don't need this math in order to do this.
You and I can be in a field and even a field that's complicated, like that's not level or flat, and it's got waves in it and bumps.
And one of us can throw the ball competently to the other as long as the range is right and get it to that person more or less every time all day long and catch the ball too.
We can look at the ball and calculate where we have to move on a field more or less to move there to catch the ball.
And we're good at this.
The arc of things thrown through the air.
We are very good at this, actually.
And a lot of other mammals, especially mammals, are also very good at this.
Dogs, if you've ever seen a dog that has been trained to catch a ball in the air, they're phenomenally good at this.
Embarrassingly so compared to humans, actually.
I certainly can't catch a ball in my mouth.
No, no, but I mean, it doesn't even seem like they're looking.
They get one look at the ball and the arc and where it's going, and then they run and they're not looking at it.
And then they just jump and catch it.
And that's a, that's, it's amazing.
And this is the thing, this is a thing that we're naturally good at.
And there's a reason why.
It's because for many millions of generations, we have been descended from creatures that got an evolutionary advantage from being able to do this.
Right.
Either avoiding things that have been thrown at us or actively being able to throw things and hit things from a long way away.
If you're going to throw a stone to hit a lizard so that you can eat that night, having the ability to do that would allow you to eat more reliably than someone who didn't have the ability to do that.
Or even just swinging through the trees, you know, our predecessors, you know, small mammals.
If they did things.
I don't know.
Maybe they didn't.
I don't know.
I mean, that's the Tarzan was famously said to, you know.
Well, not literally, but I mean, from branch to branch.
Yeah, yeah, but if you're going to move like that, you're going to jump.
Anytime you have to jump, you're doing this thing where you are the object moving through the air, and you have to know that you're going to be able to land on the next branch over or across this chasm over this crocodile pit, whatever it is.
Are you describing the game pitfall?
Maybe.
And your brain has to be able to do this.
And being able to do it better gave you an advantage over the life forms that were like you that couldn't do that.
And you were more likely to propagate your part of the species, and your DNA moved on and theirs didn't.
And on we go.
So that this went splat on the ground.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This ability became part of our evolutionary path.
And in doing so, the brain became more wired this way because it, that was an advantage that kept us alive and also kept us eating.
So here's some other things that we're not very good at naturally.
When you have to take a cup of one size and shape, and you have to guess whether it's more volume than another cup of a certain size or shape, unless they're ridiculously different, humans are notoriously bad at this.
Or you might even say, if you have a smaller cup and a larger cup and they're different shapes, and you have to guess how many fills of the smaller cup will fill the larger cup, whether it's a bucket or whatever, we're really bad at this.
And it's not to say that you couldn't become trained.
You couldn't get used to things of this shape and get some experience that will increase your ability to guess this way.
But right out of the box, like right out of the box, we're pretty good at tossing a ball around.
Right out of the box, we're not good at this.
We have to work some extra magic in our heads.
We have to get some experience with different volumes because we're not very good at volumes.
Knowing how much volume, like if you're going to look at, if you were to look at some water on the floor and see it make a puddle, and you were to try to guess the size of the cup that that puddle, you would be very, very bad at this.
Everyone would be.
It's just not something we're good at.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why, you know, there are contests.
Guess how many jelly beans are in this junk?
Yeah, right.
You know, that's why almost every season, the show Big Brother has a competition where they will show the players a small version of something like, here are 100 marshmallows.
Yeah.
This is what 100 marshmallows look like.
And then they'll show them something with larger.
Yeah, much larger with a number of mushrooms and a complicated thing.
And they'll be like, guess how many mushrooms are here?
Yeah.
And inevitably, they do terrible at it.
Yeah.
Reliably terrible.
Yeah.
Yes.
But yeah, that goes back to what you were saying about evolution.
You know, figuring out how much water is in a puddle does not come up for earlier animals or humans.
If they were thirsty, they drank.
If the puddle ran out, they stopped drinking and went looking for other water.
Knowing, yeah, knowing anything about volumes of fluids didn't help any of our ancestors live through anything.
Right.
And, you know, similarly, and I suspect you're approaching this, you know, understanding what a million people looks like.
Yeah.
Never came up.
Very large numbers.
Yeah.
Determining the distance to the stars or the age of the universe never came up.
And these are also things that people are notoriously either bad at or just have difficulty comprehending.
Yeah, conceiving in their brains.
Yeah.
So we have a couple examples about distances.
So straight line distances we're sort of okay at.
We're much better at distances that relate to parts of our bodies.
So distances that have to do with roughly the length and width of our hands, and then also the lengths of our bodies generally.
Our feet.
See, this is why the metric system never caught on in the U.S. Is that the reason?
Really?
That's the reason because we measure by feet, see?
Whose feet, David?
Yes, exactly.
Whose feet?
Yes, the king's old feet.
I don't remember.
You know, and I, you know, and of course, we, you know, there was also horsepower, you know, the, and there's actually another one I can't think of.
It's the number of hands, like how many feet in Britain, I think, hands high or how many hairs are usually measured in hands.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or stone, mass of a person in stone.
Right.
Yeah.
But the, when you're looking at straight line distances, we're actually not very good out of the box, mind you.
We're not very good at distances that are much longer than our bodies, actually.
You can get, you can get experience that allows you to do that.
If you know, you drive a longer truck and you, you know, the truck is this length and that correlates to this length.
And then you can compare that in your brain when things are that far away.
Oh, that's about whatever, eight meters.
David, eight meters.
Eight meters?
I don't know what a number is.
Yeah.
About 25 feet.
I was going to say 24 plus some random amount that I don't know.
It's about 25 feet.
Yeah.
So we get this situation.
And there's another accorrel of this is that as soon as you take it from a straight line distance to any kind of curve, that's when it really gets thrown for a loop.
Your brain is notoriously bad at understanding.
Like if we gave you a string and then there was a pillar and we told you to tell us without measuring it out how much of the string would exactly fit around the pillar, this is a thing people in general would be reliably bad at because it's difficult for the human brain to work out a circumference.
You'd have to work out the equation actually.
So if you use the equation, you could do it pretty good.
But if you're not doing that, you're just kind of measuring, oh, about this much.
Wildly inaccurate, reliably, wildly inaccurate.
And arcs, also arcs, the lengths of arcs, we're not very good at estimating this distance at all.
Like Noah's?
Different arc.
That's a type of bow.
This is like not a straight line, not a straight line.
Yeah.
Like the path of a football as it's tossed through the air.
Yeah.
The exact length of that arc is difficult to work out.
You know, it's more than the straight line distance, but exactly how much more isn't something that we're good at at knowing just by some kind of nature.
There was no evolutionary advantage to knowing these things.
And so our brain never worked on it.
Knowing lengths that were similar to the lengths of our body, there probably was very good advantage to that, something like that.
But other than that, it wasn't very useful.
How far away, maybe you're used to the length of a football field.
And you say, oh, it's about a football field away.
So it must be this far.
But more than that, or a length that you're not always used to, you're going to be very bad at it.
Guaranteed.
Yeah.
Well, pretty much guaranteed.
Yeah.
There's exceptions to everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's people who are freakishly good at math just out of the box.
There's many stories about them.
I don't want to go into them today.
They're talking about stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, it depends also.
You know, I was good at math through high school, through some of college, but, you know, like I mentioned, I'm an engineer.
I had a lot of high-level math, calculus, differential equations, matrices.
And I made it, but I also remember leaving my differential equation final and punching a sign because I was so upset at how I thought I had done.
And so, yeah, I also remember the smart Alec Grader in one in my differential equations class where I had answered homework as infinity and the actual answer was eight.
And so he wrote a note that said, if you had just turned it on its side.
Great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
It's a math humor.
But yeah, I mean, I did it.
Did I ever have to use differential equations once I got into the real world?
No, because my particular job didn't require it.
Did I have to use calculus?
No, because again, my particular job didn't require it.
If I had gone into my actual field, which was material science engineering instead of environmental where I ended up, then I probably would have had to use it, but I didn't.
And so, you know, I was able to just kind of revert back to the math I was good at.
Yeah.
And, you know, I know a lot of people like that.
They're good at math until they're not.
You know, they get to a certain level.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and I've heard that before about people who are, you know, maybe a person who has a master's degree and then was attempting to get their PhD and they were just stonewalled by the level of math required.
And that's, I mean, that's real.
Yeah.
I mean, there were limits to what I did with math too.
When I was that there was things where I was like, well, I, you know, I don't know if I'm getting much more from this when I learn more.
I don't know if I'll be able to go much further.
I mean, so anyway, back to things that we're not good at with math.
This is a fun one for me.
I like this one, which is that we're not actually very good at determining lengths of time on our own.
So especially short lengths of time.
It seems it's, it's a sort of thing that seems really everyone thinks they are good at this.
But for example, how long does it take to get to your car after you close your front door?
Like from letting go the door handle on your door to opening the door on your car.
I have no idea because I go out my back door.
To your car?
Yes.
Okay.
So you have a door handle on your back door.
Yes.
Same question.
Right.
But you have some length of time.
And you're just guessing this, you're probably going to be off by factor of two, factor of three.
And that's going to be very common.
If you're going to say, you know, leaving your once you start your car and you start rolling, how long does it take to get from the end of your driveway to the end of your street?
And you do this every day, pretty much.
But if you're just going to guess at it right now without ever having measured it, you're probably going to be wrong by a fair amount.
And this effect is, I don't even know if it has a real name, but this is noticed in people who are, there's other things that can distort this effect.
If you're ever in, if you've ever been in a physical altercation that you weren't planning for, let's say, like planning for.
So prize fighters, of course, they have an event and they plan for it and they actually train for this is part of their training, understanding all the things that are happening.
How long you were part of that altercation is, From your perspective, going to be much different than what was actually happening.
And it's almost always in that case, you're going to think it took much longer for everything to happen than it really did.
You're noticing so many things.
It's like your brain is noticing so many things in that moment because it feels it needs to to help you survive it, that you're sort of measuring the time based on the number of individual things you noticed in all of that.
Yeah, it's like when time slows down if you're in a car accident.
Yeah, right.
That that's also, that's also a thing.
Your, your brain is attempting to notice more and more things because it thinks it needs to to help you get the information you need to survive.
And, you know, I'm not a neuroscientist.
I've never looked into this on a professional level, but I think that's similar to what's really happening in your brain is that when you walk simply from your front door to your car, there's very few things that your conscious part of your brain is noticing.
So you're probably going to think it took much less time than it really did.
Because when you look back and you think in your memory how long it took, what you're really measuring is the number of conscious thoughts and things you noticed in that time versus there was no chronometer in your brain that was leading you to it.
And the same thing is true when you, if you were assaulted, God forbid it should ever happen, but if you were assaulted, the number of things your brain is noticing is huge and you're going to think it took a lot longer than it really did.
It might only take three seconds, but you're going to think it took, oh, it must have been 15, 20 seconds or something, right?
Like it's, it drastically drags it out in your brain.
And we're just not very good at this.
Like I say, professional fighters will sort of train to notice all the things and to notice the time because they might have to play for the clock and they might not be able to see it.
But without specific training for that, like I say, just as a machine, a meat computer right out of the box, you're just not going to be good at this.
So it sort of says something about our nature, the nature of our relationship with time.
We're always moving forward in it, but we don't really have an intuitive grasp of what's happening there.
I went on for a long time about time.
It must be one of my favorite topics.
Well, no, it's only been three seconds, actually.
Whoa.
Actually, you've really been talking quickly.
That does happen to me when podcasting.
When I naturally talk fast, I believe.
And then I'll, you know, when I'm podcasting, usually not on this podcast, but on the one I do about survivor, I will feel like, okay, there's a lot to talk about.
I need to talk quickly.
And then I'll think I'm talking quickly and I'll listen to it back.
And I'll be like, wow, I was not at all talking quickly.
Yeah.
And so it's just interesting because I hear other podcasters and I'm like, why are they talking so slow?
They need to speed it up.
And I mean, I listen to podcasts at 3x speed.
Yeah.
And part of that is because I feel like a lot of podcasters talk slow.
But then I hear myself doing it too.
And I don't know if it's just as you're trying to get thoughts out or it's the normal conversation.
Even if I'm trying to go quickly, if someone else is just having a normal conversation, it kind of just, you know, pulls it back to a normal interaction.
Yeah.
But, you know, there are a lot of things besides time that people are really bad at if you're, if you're done with time.
No, I'm done with time.
Yeah.
If we have time for it.
We have time for anything else other than time now that we're done with time.
And it's like, for example, I mentioned like trying to understand a million people or just large numbers.
People are bad at it.
And I think to me, this is why a quote that is often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin, but more likely came from German writer Kurt, oof, I'm going to mess this up, Chaikalski.
I think this is why it still rings true in saying one death is a tragedy.
A million deaths are a statistic.
And we see this all the time, whether it was looking at COVID, gun violence, war, anything.
And, you know, a perfect example that, you know, will probably be a bit in our rear view by the time this episode airs is the destruction of the Titan submarine, killing five people.
And it gained so much media attention when there was simultaneously hundreds of deaths of migrants in Europe that barely got any attention at all.
Now, of course, part of this, maybe the largest part, is attributable to the Titan victims, you know, being billionaires while the migrants were obviously not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cynically, I'm really shocked and surprised that billionaires allowed this to happen to themselves.
Yes.
And the poor people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
But we got to know the individual stories of each one of those people on the sub.
Yeah.
I don't know the individual stories of almost, I mean, I read a couple of them of some of the migrants, but it was easy to broadcast about the Titan passengers.
There were only five of them.
Yeah.
And so it's, it's just, you know, and when, like I said, going back to COVID deaths, if your grandmother got COVID and died, that was a tragedy to you.
Yeah.
But there are people who will look at the millions of people who died and they'll be like, yeah, nobody I know died from it.
Yeah.
Which is hard to believe.
I mean, they're probably deluding themselves, but you know, and they just can't or won't comprehend it.
It's the same with gun deaths over and over again, mass shootings, mass shootings, mass shootings.
And nobody does anything about it.
Well, nobody, the Republicans.
And so, you know, because it wasn't someone they knew necessarily.
And it's just that difference of, you know, the personal story to the big number that evolution never prepared us for because evolution prepared us for small family neighbor groups.
Yeah.
You know, it didn't, it didn't matter what happened on the other side of the continent because it didn't affect us or our ancestors.
And I just think individual stories are a big part of the reason that math often takes a back seat in our brains, because you see that anecdotes feature so strongly in arguments for many anti-scientific viewpoints, from, again, gun control to alternative medicine to anti-vaxxers to alien encounters.
Because if your friend Jimmy took a pill and suddenly felt better from his illness, well, that's evidence that you are more likely to accept rather than some scientific paper that examined thousands of people who took this pill.
And we see this all the time.
But my friend Jimmy took it and he got better.
That's great, but it doesn't actually answer any questions, you know, because when we tested a thousand people, a certain number got better normally, and taking that pill didn't do anything to change it.
Yeah.
So, as a nitpicky math guy, David, I feel like I need to tease apart these two things that you've kind of lumped together there.
Okay.
One is you're actually, well, you are right about both, but taking them one at a time, you are right that humans are very bad at the very large numbers and what might be called as a mathematical concept, exponents.
The mathematical concept of exponents is fairly simple to understand.
I can't remember which grade it was first introduced, somewhere around six or seven, maybe.
But when you talk about a million, this is an exponent.
This is 10 taken to the sixth power.
And working out how many that is in your brain is very, very difficult.
And it's very, very common for it to be very, very difficult.
If you, an old story, an old Chinese proverb, says that there was a wise man who was needed by the king.
His services were needed by the king.
And he says, What do you want as payment for your services?
Every time I ask a question, he says, Well, here's what will happen.
He takes what's essentially a chessboard, an eight by eight square, and says, He puts a grain of sand on the first square and says, Every time you ask me a new question, you will put twice the number of grains of sand.
I said sand, I should say rice, twice the number of grains of rice on the next square as you had on the previous square.
And you can keep asking questions until you run out of squares.
And the king immediately says, Oh, well, you're selling yourself too short.
Of course, I will, you know, and so he starts asking all these frivolous questions immediately, using up all of the small numbers.
And it slowly starts increasing by a factor of two each time until finally he needs to, he gets invaded by a neighboring kingdom, and he has to ask some very important questions to save his kingdom.
And he can't afford it because the number has increased so quickly now that he would have to pay all of the rice available.
And the wise man would own the kingdom, would own the entire kingdom at that point.
So, because he just didn't have a really good grasp of how quickly that number would increase, he just thought to himself, Oh, what a silly old fool.
I'll just milk him for all he's worth and use up all these, all these questions because I can get them basically for free.
One single grain of rice, two single grains of rice.
It didn't mean anything to him.
And this is a thing where you can almost see as you listen to the story how it is that you get caught in this trap where you think to yourself, Well, of course, you can ask a lot of questions for very, very cheap until you can't.
Yeah.
And right.
And it's hard to say.
It's hard to imagine.
Even me knowing how it works, it's hard for me to imagine the scale of how quickly it becomes unreachable.
So that's the first one that you mentioned.
And then the second one that I tease apart from there is statistics as a separate area of science.
Statistics is also very difficult to just understand intuitively.
It feels like something we should be able to understand intuitively, but it's really not.
Simple concepts in statistics like average and median and mean, they're very similar and they're slightly different and getting into slightly more complicated standard deviation and normal distribution curves.
You know, it starts to get a little sideways.
And then you get into things like p-values and how large your sample size has to be in order to be a meaningful representation of an entire population.
And then you start to go, well, very quickly just loses grasp of reality.
You can do it as a study of mathematics, but you just can't do it as a matter of just looking at numbers and doing a gut check on them.
Yeah.
And I think that's where I was linking them is you lose that connection because it turns into, you know, big numbers that you can't see.
You know, for like the numbers that, you know, the big numbers, I will often see when numbers get big enough, suddenly, you know, they will, you know, like the media may switch into saying like, well, how many people died?
Well, 10 football stadiums worth.
Right.
So, you know, because people can visualize a full football stadium, but they can't visualize 700,000 people.
Yeah.
And the same with statistics.
I may have brought this up on a previous podcast.
I don't remember, but I do remember early on in COVID when, you know, there were people saying, oh, you know, what was it, a 2% death rate?
That's not bad.
And so some media group, TV station, they interviewed a guy who was saying this.
You know, and he was just a guy on the street.
He wasn't some big promoter.
They just asked questions.
And he was like, no, I don't think that's bad.
And then they brought in, obviously they had done some work.
They brought in 100 of his relatives.
Yeah.
You know, and said, okay, pick the two of your relatives that you're going to kill.
Yeah.
You know, and suddenly it became real for him.
You know, just saying 2% isn't, you know, a big number.
Right.
Yeah.
And you still see that with some of the, you know, oh, let the people who say let kids catch COVID.
It's, you know, oh, it'll only kill, you know, it's got such a low death rate.
And da, da, da, da.
Really?
Okay.
Okay.
So it's okay with you if we kill 400 kids a year then.
You're fine with that.
You know, and then so you have to kind of switch, you know, because when they're talking statistics, it sounds so blasé.
But when you actually bring it back and say, this is how many children will die.
Yeah.
You know.
And they'll be additional to the number of children that die from other things.
Right.
Right.
It won't be that they were going to die of something else and they just died of this instead.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Which is another important thing that they try to sort of slur off.
Well, the children are going to die anyway.
So like, really?
Or old people are going to die anyway.
So it's this or something else.
Right.
You say, well, they don't have to die.
Yeah.
Everyone has to die eventually, but they don't have to die today or this year.
Right.
And so, you know, and that's where statistics kind of loops back into scientific studies.
This is why, this is why humanity had to invent science because you can't go buy Jimmy took this pill and it worked for him.
Yeah.
You know, we learned that many, many years ago.
And because anecdotes as a whole don't work.
Anecdotes can lead to something, but they are not in and of themselves the whole story.
You know, I mean, we saw this whole stupidity with ivermectin.
You know, that started somewhere.
Somewhere someone took ivermectin and they got better.
I was like, oh, look, you know, it's this miracle drug.
I believe that ivermectin was used to treat people who were Dying from SARS-CoV-1 12 to 14 years ago, whenever we had SARS-CoV-1, I'm not even sure, but ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were both used for that.
And that was the first reason why people thought they were.
And every once in a while, I catch someone trying to pass off a study from 12 years ago that says, because sometimes in the study in the wording, it'll just say SARS or whatever.
And because in that time, it was called just SARS, it wasn't called COVID or anything else.
And they'll try to pass this off.
And they'll say, oh, it says right here, it says right here that hydroxychloroquine is blah, blah, blah, blah, and it does this.
And then you'll just look at the study and you'll point out that, oh, this was made, you know, 11, 12 years ago before we had COVID.
Like, what, what do you think is happening here, really?
Like, is this a time-traveling virus?
Obviously not.
And of course, what other people mention is that, rightfully so, is that there were people who, when this first came up, they knew that it was a virus that had developed as a variation of SARS-CoV-1.
And they knew that these things had been used to treat whatever level of success they had.
I'm not even sure because there weren't all that many patients from SARS-CoV-1, really.
There was some level that this might work.
And they did tests what's called in vitro, which is in a Petri dish.
And it was more resilient to the effects of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
And in particular, the case of ivermectin, it didn't have any effect on the virus in a petri dish until you got to a dosage that was roughly 20 times what would be toxic for a human.
And so they rapidly said, who first looked into it, said, well, you know, technically it does work, but it wouldn't be useful as a treatment for this reason.
And this is a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Something to remember about working in a petri dish is, you know, you can also kill a bacteria in a petri dish with a gun.
Bleach, right?
Yes.
All sorts of things can kill it in a petri dish.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you say bleach, but you know, Trump was advocating that.
Just inject some bleach.
So when you have this situation, that's very careful.
You have to watch where the information is coming from, what the context of the data is.
And people will try to do this to try to push a narrative that in some cases, I think some of the people who have linked those things didn't realize that, for example, the study they were linking was from many years ago.
They were given it by someone else and someone else, someone probably knew in the some grifter originally said, oh, look at this, blah, blah, blah.
Got away with it for a while.
Some people just took that as a thing.
When I asked for people for the reason why they think it's true, some people still link that.
And I point out that's not accurate information.
That's about a different virus called SARS-CoV-1.
You shouldn't confuse the two because they're different viruses.
Right.
And, you know, but to take it back to, you know, the math, and I mean, that's the good thing.
You can do the scientific experiments to determine it, as opposed to, like I said, we have all, you know, I mean, you know, a name that has frequently come up in our recent podcasts is Joe Rogan.
And he was out there like, I took ivermectin and I got back.
Possible he was going to get better anyway because most people generally survive.
Usually, but yeah, you know, and then you read, you know, the sorry anti-vaxxer Twitter account, who is currently on a 400 and some day, you know, count off of all these people who actively advocated against vaccines.
And a lot of them were pro-Ivermectin, pro-these other things, and they did not survive.
So, you know, it's a reason that I have seen, you know, through all of my years, decades involved in some way or another in science advocacy, you know, there's been a lot of discussion of, okay, we know we have the science on our side, but how do we get that through to the people?
Do we need to use more of these individual stories?
I know right now there's a group, and I don't remember exactly which group it is, but they're doing science saves.
And they wanted stories of how did science save your life.
Those stories might be able to help how people see it.
It's not just some random, oh, science and scientists in their lab coats.
But no, this is how it resulted in life-saving activity and use more of those, for lack of a better term, anecdotes for good instead of for evil.
Yeah.
So, as we sometimes do, we're a little off topic, but that's all right.
We'll wrap this up here, I think, and remind people that math is very important.
Don't discourage your children or your nieces' nephews or your neighbors' children from working to understand math at the very least, even if they're not going in a field that they think will, strictly speaking, need it.
But really, everyone needs it now more than ever in order to understand a very complicated world.
People are going to need more math knowledge in general, or they're going to get grifted by people who use it to distort rather than to inform.
So, with that, I think we'll sign off.
Did we already do where we could find us?
No, we need to do that again.
Well, you can find me on Twitter.
I'm Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
If you want to argue with me there or point out where I'm wrong, but if you want to do it with more words, you can send an email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
I will answer that email.
I don't yet have so many that I can't answer them.
So, by all means, let me know what you think.
And I am at David Bloomberg on Twitter, on Blue Sky, on Mastodon, on Post.
You know, just keeping all my options open in case Twitter implodes.