In Smart Heuristics, Gerd Gigernezer examines how humans deal with uncertainty:
At the beginning of the 20th century the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells, said in his writings on politics, “If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking.” At the beginning of the 21st century, how far have we gotten with this program? In our society, we teach most citizens reading and writing from the time they are children, but not statistical thinking. John Alan Paulos has called this phenomenon innumeracy.There are many stories documenting this problem. For instance, there was the weather forecaster who announced on American TV that if the probability that it will rain on Saturday is 50 percent and the probability that it will rain on Sunday is 50 percent, the probability that it will rain over the weekend is 100 percent. In another recent case reported by New Scientist an inspector in the Food and Drug Administration visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche. We can laugh about these examples because we easily understand the mistakes involved, but there are more serious issues. When it comes to medical and legal issues, we need exactly the kind of education that H. G. Wells was asking for, and we haven’t gotten it.