Doing arithmetic in public
Stuff’s story about the real costs and potential profits of ‘The Block’-style renovations is an example of something we should see more of. Except, that ideally, we wouldn’t need the newspapers to do it for us.
Matthew Yglesias, at Slate, has a related complaint about ‘math is hard’ descriptions of national budgets
one of the most frustrating things about Washington-style budgeting—there are tons of numbers but almost no math, and yet the barely extant math is considered extremely difficult to master.
The math in question, however, consists of basically stuff you should have mastered in eighth or ninth grade. You add stuff up, multiply, and sometimes solve for x.
And you don’t even have to do it by hand, as you might have in school.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »