Be Numerate

Like literate, but with numbers.

Sometimes people make arguments that are clearly incoherent in the face of simple numerical realities. Worse, within the ideological groups where this happens, these arguments are treated not very differently from better ones that gesture at the same sentiments while also being correct. It seems to me that in a healthy political culture, innumerate arguments should get recognized as such, and not be tolerated simply because they signal affiliation with some set of ideas.

Here are some ideas I’ve recently come across that strike me as popular yet innumerate. These are just illustrative examples, not an attempt at an exhaustive list.

AI is bad for the environment. The majority of people I’ve talked to about this seem to think that personal AI use is bad for the environment in some serious way. A number of people I know think the problem is severe enough that you should avoid using AI entirely. In reality, the average American uses 10,000 times the energy of one ChatGPT prompt per day, per Andy Masley. This means that if you prompt ChatGPT one hundred times every single day, it would only account for 1% of your energy use. Similarly, we can see Twitter users complaining about a Texas data center using 463 million gallons of water, when data centers actually combine for less than 0.01% of the state’s total water usage. The UK government even officially recommends deleting old emails and pictures to save water -- whether this makes sense is left as an exercise for the reader.

Elon Musk is lucky, not talented. We can grant that he was born with some privilege: his father gave him $28,000 to found his first company, and likely paid his tuition and so on. This is certainly an advantage, but not one that explains becoming the world’s richest person! Not a single other person in the world has taken similar privileges and turned them into over $400 billion; very, very few have even turned them into $1 billion. Elon was CEO of PayPal, founded SpaceX, led early investing in Tesla and became CEO, co-founded OpenAI, founded xAI and acquired Twitter, arguably influenced the outcome of the 2024 election, and created a new government department for himself to lead. To attribute this entirely to luck is to close your eyes to the statistical reality that it is basically impossible to stumble your way into that much power. There are other ways to express “I don’t like this person” that are more compatible with the truth.

Students deserve higher grades. On Columbia’s Sidechat (like a private Reddit for college students), you’ll see people calling it unfair that an A- is a 3.67 on the GPA scale. Posts that complain about grade inflation consistently get downvoted. A class with low raw exam scores is seen as one to avoid, even if the professor curves the median to the B+/A- line (standard practice). There’s a lot more I’d like to say about grade inflation, but the relevant piece right now is that there’s this popular sentiment that out-of-context absolute classroom scores have some inherent meaning, that we’d all be better off if a few more points were distributed to all. They don’t, and we wouldn’t! A 3.9 is high because it’s above the average, not because of some property of the number 3.9. If your A- was valued higher than 3.67, you’d compare to your peers just the same as before. If anything, a class with low raw scores may be easier, since you’re not expected to absorb as much of the examined material.

In many of these cases, I don’t even think you need to know any relevant facts in order to recognize an innumerate argument. All you need is a mental model of physical reality that has any sort of sense of scale. Without numbers, I still could have told you that it doesn’t make sense to avoid using ChatGPT for environmental reasons, because it is intuitive that a computer operation that doesn’t cost me money cannot have any major physical ramifications. I don’t need to know any statistics to be confident that Elon Musk has internal qualities that are, in some relevant sense, exceptional.

It is a shame that so many highly educated, politically engaged people lack the numerical intuition to spot obvious falsehoods. I would much prefer to live in a political culture where, if you bemoan President Trump’s disinterest in the truth and then turn around and say these sorts of things, the rest of the community has both the sense and the courage to point this out.

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