I am not a scientist or researcher and I’m far from the smartest person I know. Yet I can easily read the chart above, which illustrates exponential growth. I can also easily grasp the implications of the concept of exponential growth for something like — oh, I don’t know — the spread of a highly contagious virus.
Exponential growth and it’s connection to the real world is not rocket science. I thought anyone with a college education understood this.
I was wrong.
Recently, I learned that one of the smartest and most successful people I know, someone with wide national if not international influence, could not grasp, despite repeated explanations, what exponential growth meant in the real world. Worse, that person’s colleagues — people who are equally smart and even more influential — find exponential growth so irrelevant to real life that they persisted in going into their crowded office (even though most of their work could easily be done at home) while tens of thousands in their city and even dozens of their own colleagues fell ill around them.
And so, as the first few cases appeared in their city back in late February, they looked at those early death-soaked statistics from the Wuhan outbreak and thought, “Look around, it’s just three or four people here. Nothing to worry about.” And just kept on keeping on.
The principle reason that over 150,000 Americans are dead today is that Donald Trump and his administration failed utterly in their response. But this breathtaking incapacity to understand the basic implications of a simple quantitative concept was repeated over and over again, not only by people who never went to college but also by some of the most highly educated people around.
To me, this conceptual blindness represents a failure of national educational policy in at least two ways. First, there is a national failure to teach non-STEM students even the basics of statistical analysis. Who needs stats, anyway, if you’re passionate about art history and don’t give a hoot about geology? Answer: you do. Proof? The pandemic.
The second failure is a failure — both in and out of the sciences — to teach even the basics of how to be creative in an effective manner. A technical understanding of exponential growth is one thing. But to understand what such a growth curve could mean in the real world? That takes a trained imagination plus creativity — not much, but enough to connect dots in a reasonable way.
Proof? It’s not just math-phobes who couldn’t understand what those awful charts implied. I know medical students and researchers — not conspiracy theorists but some of the most level-headed people in my circle — who couldn’t connect the 6 or 7 Covid cases they’d heard about in their communities with what they understood from their stats 101 class about exponential growth.
Some time in the future when we have rational leadership again — and let that time begin today with Trump’s and Pence’s immediate resignations — the way in which this country is educated needs a complete and thorough overhaul. All of us need a far better understanding of basic statistical thinking. And all of us also need a far better understanding of how to think imaginatively about how those stats affect our lives.