I think there's actually two things going on here. There's what this post is talking about, which is a general lack of understanding of statistics, which is likely true and correct, and likely for both reasons that are explored here.
Then there's the reason to actually even talk about this specific instance, which is that there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently. Whether it's rampant on twitter and between political parties or has spilled into other areas such that it's harder to have coherent discussions in general now than it was in years past I'm not sure.
There are a lot of assumptions in that reply to the tweet in question that's shown. It's not even a novel set of assumptions, it's the standard twitter fare of "I assume he means X and this thing doesn't explicitly show X therefore he must not understand what he's talking about." Any nuance such as using a secondary aspect of something to outline a potion of what you mean is immediately ignored, and if pointed out later assumed to be covering up after the fact.
> ...there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently.
This is basically what all politics is. People projecting thoughts (or lack thereof) in bad faith on each other. Though it does seem that the fraction of society sucked into this toxic discourse has grown to cover practically everything lately (in the US anyway).
But also the outrage machine of Twitter etc is obviously biased toward the extreme views and outliers. Where 99/100 people might say 'meh, another failure to predict the future like most', the remaining 1/100 blows his top and gets the attention.
For all the negativity out there, there is a lot more clarity in challenging bad interpretations. I havent learnt as much online recently as I have in 15 yrs on the net.
Lol, I believe that. The problem is that these days it seems like the message either has to be only visible by friendlies, or reduced to the simplest and rote version that's impossible to misinterpret if you want to avoid people trying to tear it apart, and even then they'll sometimes pull it into some wider framework of society and what it means when views through the lens of X, Y and Z and why you should be mad. That's a high bar to hit just to tweet something.
It's crazy, and twitter's where it's easiest to see, but you can also use a news aggregator like news.google.com and get a good dose of it just from the headlines about what is ostensibly the same story from different news agencies. Wild times.
Then there's the reason to actually even talk about this specific instance, which is that there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently. Whether it's rampant on twitter and between political parties or has spilled into other areas such that it's harder to have coherent discussions in general now than it was in years past I'm not sure.
There are a lot of assumptions in that reply to the tweet in question that's shown. It's not even a novel set of assumptions, it's the standard twitter fare of "I assume he means X and this thing doesn't explicitly show X therefore he must not understand what he's talking about." Any nuance such as using a secondary aspect of something to outline a potion of what you mean is immediately ignored, and if pointed out later assumed to be covering up after the fact.