{
  "id": "1998-february-wipe-away-math-fears",
  "slug": "1998-february-wipe-away-math-fears",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-february-wipe-away-math-fears.html",
  "year": 1998,
  "month": "February",
  "monthNum": 2,
  "headline": "Wipe away math fears",
  "kicker": "STATS FROM THE ROAD",
  "author_name": "Sarah Cohen",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "NICAR",
  "summary": "Journalists can overcome math anxiety by using practical techniques like rounding numbers to relatable scales, developing numerical intuition through estimation exercises, and learning from how broadcast journalists selectively use meaningful statistics.",
  "keywords": [
    "numbers",
    "estimation",
    "journalists"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Journalism & Newsroom",
    "Investigative Methods"
  ],
  "technologies": [],
  "full_text": "You probably fear math and numbers far less than you suspect. Most reporters can figure a tip on a restaurant tab. They can split the bill easily. Many invest, buy homes, and work with other complex financial calculations regularly. And, unlike me, most can and do balance their checkbooks.\n\nHere are some tricks to get you started in your quest to conquer your math phobia.\n\nTrick #1: Round off.\n\nIf you're talking about the population of the U.S., don't think of 270 million. Think of 250. Or 300. That makes it easy to get a gut feeling of scale. If 12 percent of the U.S. is African-American, round that off to 10 percent, or 15 percent. Now just figure a tip on a $30 dinner bill - somewhere between $3.00 and $4.50 if you're frugal. So the number you're seeking is somewhere between 30 and 45 million people.\n\nThe lesson: Think in small, round, numbers that correspond to something you'd be able to figure out in real life: a tip, a 25-percent-off sale, a 10-percent raise. You can change the scale of virtually every number you'll see to get to that point.\n\nTrick #2: Develop a sense of scale.\n\nAnother trick is borrowed from John Allen Paulos' book, Innumeracy. The book is filled with what Paulos calls simple exercises, which few of us think are simple. It does, though, include one remarkably effective piece of advice: Learn to guess the numbers you look up before you look them up. Being wrong, as you almost always will be, will help cement in your mind the correct answer.\n\nIf you guessed that the U.S. had an economy of $450 billion, and you learned through research that it is closer to $8 trillion, you'll remember your error every time you need to use the number. It also means you'll no longer think of a billion as the biggest number you can imagine, the way an editor did when she changed the word 'billion' to 'million' in a story because she thought it was simply too big to be true.\n\nI once admitted to my boss, jokingly, that I didn't pay attention to numbers - they all looked the same to me. He exploded. He rightly mentioned, not so politely, that I couldn't possibly know whether something was right or reasonable if I had no frame of reference. If I didn't know that the Nixon administration slapped on price controls when inflation was only 6 percent year, how could I possibly call any inflation rate 'small' or 'large'?\n\nYou'll have different scales that are important to your beat: How long the typical person lives, the number of people in your community, or the market share of General Motors. Developing your instinct of what's big and what's little will cut seemingly complex issues down to size, eliminating the meaningless numbers and focusing on the important ones.\n\nTrick #3: Watch television news.\n\nBroadcasters have far less freedom to bore readers with meaningless numbers. In any story, you may quibble with the number the reporter chose to focus on. But you'll become more selective in your use of numbers and avoid the all-too-common story construction of anecdote, nut graf, then numbers you hope your readers will avoid.\n\nTrick #4: Ask your best sources for help.\n\nPeople love sharing certain kinds of secrets. They usually involve secrets that will show you how much they know or how clever they are.\n\nYou might ask your county budget director to show you the math (and the spreadsheets) she uses when she develops the budget each year. You might ask the academic author of a new study to walk through some of the methodology with you. You'll become more adept at listening to people talk about numbers - something that has to come while you try to overcome your fear.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-february-wipe-away-math-fears.html",
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