How The War Against Innumeracy Was Won
In the Year 2054: Innumeracy Defeated by Gerd Gigerenzer
It is the year 2054. Our great-granddaughters and great-grandsons are celebrating a triple anniversary:the 400th anniversary of the mathematical theory of probability, the 200th of George Boole’s The Laws of Thought, and the 100th of the publication of Leonard Savage’s Foundations of Statistics. This year’s celebration happens to coincide with the final victory over an intellectual disability that has plagued humankind for centuries: innumeracy, or the inability to think with numbers, specifi cally numbers that represent uncertainties and risks. Where are we? In Paris. It was in France that probability theory was born, back in the seventeenth century. The Great Hall at the Sorbonne is packed with flowers and guests, and is presided over jointly by the president of France and the president of the World Health Organization. A large curved podium provides the set for the four most distinguished scholars in the social sciences. At least, this is what the programme says. Other scholars in the audience think they should have been asked to speak, but Fortuna was not with them. The topic of this afternoon’s panel discussion is “How the war against innumeracy was won.” The chair is Professor Emile Ecu, an economist at the Sorbonne.
Chair: Madame le President, Monsieur le President, dear panel, guests, and audience. We have exactly 30 minutes to reconstruct what is arguably the greatest success of the social sciences in the twenty-fi rst century, the defeat of innumeracy. The twentieth century had eradicated illiteracy, that is, the inability to read and write, at least in France. The challenge to our century was innumeracy. The costs of innumeracy have been a tremendous fi nancial burden to modern economies, as had been those of illiteracy before. This year, the war against innumeracy has been declared won by the World Health Organization. Let us ask our distinguished panelists how this success came about?
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In the Year 2054: Innumeracy Defeated by Gerd Gigerenzer is a chapter of the highly recommended book:
etc. frequency processing and cognition by Peter Sedlmeier and Tilmann Betsch