If I could change one thing about our education system, I’d emphasize at all grade levels a set of skills you might call “data literacy” — a combination of things like numeracy, basic statistics, and generally the ability to think about quantitative data coherently.
Until we get this, I’ll just have to dream of the day when it would be surprising to hear a member of Congress say
In the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.
Kudos to the reporter for following this sentence immediately with the following one-sentence paragraph:
In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.
