"I can't do math" (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/michael.molinsky/public.www/iaq/mmm001.html My favorite professor's take on the ever-increasing "I can't do math" statement. <comment><USER3> I see his larger point, but the conflation of "understanding math" and "being able to do simple arithmetic" is something of a pet peeve. The latter may be a useful life skill, but is not very closely related to understanding mathematics. In fact it's not only non-technical office workers who can be proud of not being able to do it: if you walk into any _math department_ you will find accomplished mathematicians almost gleefully recounting how bad they are at doing simple arithmetic. They can prove things about topological spaces but can't balance a checkbook!

That makes the comparison to literacy more complex. Clearly mathematicians think mathematics is important, or they wouldn't be studying it. But many of them consider ability to do arithmetic, as a skill, essentially irrelevant, to the point where they don't even learn it themselves. Then a question might be: what _is_ the relevant literacy-like skill? I think it comes closer to logic and analytical thinking than specifically mathematics, although understanding of statistical arguments fits into that category.

<comment><USER4> I think being able to interpret common mathematical writing in your area of expertise is a valuable skill. I think this is what is meant by "understanding math".

I don't know much about anything but signal processing, but I am able to read and understand vector/matrix notation and differential equations. This enables me to read most papers published in signal processing. Just like being able to at least roughly read most C-derived programming languages, this is a valuable skill.

I have seen coworkers "not understanding" my work because it involved problem descriptions in mathematic notation. Frankly, it annoys the hell out of me.

<comment><USER5> How about I write my comments in Turkish? It's your fault you don't understand them, after all.

The art of programming, and of comments, is the ability to communicate to another human, and incidentally to computers. (I believe that was a paraphrase of Knuth.) If the terminology gets in the way of their understanding, then use a different terminology.

(I can fight my way through a mathematics paper, myself. But why be obtuse in your communications?)

<comment><USER6> Mathematics offers a standardized, internationally accepted notation for its various problem domains. Turkish is not the standard language of software comments. So I don't think the analogy holds.

<comment><USER7> Neither is math. My guess is that you will find many more Chinese programmers who understand English comments than those that understand high-school mathematics symbols.

<comment><USER6> I would venture that any such programmers ought not work on a math-intensive domain like signal processing. Sure, not every programmer has to know high school math. You can, for example, do great work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without knowing high school math. But there are certain fields where math is unavoidable. Signal processing is one of them. And the internationally accepted notation for such math is part of what you're expected to know.

BWT, I assume you're not saying China uses different mathematical notation. I wouldn't know about that. If so, then that does undermine my argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People who say "I can't do math" are lazy? Sorry, but I think that's a gross oversimplification of the issue (which is also evidenced by the comparison to physical exercise) and the two assumptions fundamental to that opinion are just plain wrong. Namely:

> _So what do people actually mean when they say that they can't "do" math? > Usually they are really stating one of two things. First, that they don't > like mathematics. Secondly, that mathematics is more difficult for them than > other subjects, and that it takes a great deal more effort on their part to > learn it._

He conveniently chose the two reasons that are easiest to dismiss (irony, anyone?). What he fails to account for is the fact that math education is so poor that many people don't truly understand _what math is_. Beyond arithmetic and algebra, they think it's some really complicated stuff with big numbers and funny symbols that geeky people with glasses do -- it's practically a foreign language to them, except it has a reputation for being much harder.

Why is this? If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach. Those who attempt to do so often do it very poorly, which leads students to the false belief that math is extremely difficult. On the other hand, it's very easy to teach someone to memorize formulas and plug in numbers, so that's what we're most often taught in math class. That's good enough to get us through the standardized test so we can graduate from high school, but memorizing formulas and plugging in numbers is not "doing math". So I believe many people are completely justified in saying "I can't do math".

What's more, people who "can do math" should be taking the blame for those who say "I can't do math" rather than using pointless semantics to wag a finger at them.

<comment><USER9>
        What he fails to account for is the fact that math
        education is so poor that many people don't truly
        understand what math is. Beyond arithmetic and algebra,
        they think it's some really complicated stuff with big
        numbers and funny symbols that geeky people with glasses
        do -- it's practically a foreign language to them,
        except it has a reputation for being much harder.

I can attest to this. Academically, I am a reasonably able person, but I found math simply baffling at school. Arithmetic and algebra were fine. Rudimentary geometry made sense. When we got to trigonometry, things just fell apart for me. We were taught sine, cosine and tangent in the context of how they could be used to derive angles from other angles, not what they _were_ and how they _worked_. They were presented as tools that could be used in particular ways that had to be memorized. To me, it felt like trying to teach an alien from another dimension to use a hammer without the alien having any intrinsic understanding of mass or momentum or kinetic energy or friction.

In fact, if I'm totally honest, I'm not 100% I completely understand the sine function now. And it wasn't just math. In physics, current, voltage, resistance etc. were taught as inputs to formulas. I know it must be challenging to teach about these kinds of principles that lack concrete macroscopic analogs, but I can't help but feel they could have done a better job than they did. In chemistry too, I remember being taught about valency and how you could work out the valency of an element by its position on the periodic table. I asked what valency actually _was_ , either didn't understand or wasn't satisfied with the answer, asked again, and the teacher brushed off my question and carried on the with the lesson. "Oh well," I thought, "I guess I don't understand chemistry." That was when I was about 12 years old, and I didn't study chemistry after that. I studied biology until I was 16 because I had a teacher who took the time to actually explain things.

The worst part is, I went to a pretty good school. It must be absolutely dreadful at bad schools.

Most of this happened before I had regular access to the internet and the chance to learn about these things for myself. I can't help but feel the whole course of my schooling and advanced education might have been different had I had better (or at least different) teachers of hard science and math at an early age.

<comment><USER10> It's the phrase, "I'm just no good at math" that breaks my heart. Most of the time, the student is taking the blame that belongs to the education industry.

Last week, my son had a "Chapter 9" math test here in a top-ranked Silicon Valley public school. His teacher pointed us to an official study guide PDF, which we went over carefully. I was not at all surprised to find that it covered a random grab bag of unrelated topics: sorting a half-dozen fractions, each with different denominators, two different silly algorithms for multidigit multiplication, how many $2.30 widgets can you buy for $9.00, and a few others.

This incoherent, random presentation of unrelated topics within a single chapter is totally characteristic of the "reform math" so beloved by our "progressive educators." They despise the approach of methodically working through a small number of carefully sequenced topics, making sure that the foundation of layer N is solid before getting to work building the closely related layer N+1 on top of it. They call it, "drill and kill," "soul- crushing," and "creativity destroying."

Instead of mastering a few closely-related concepts each year and systematically building expertise, they prefer "exposing" kids briefly to lots of unrelated math ideas, trusting that some kids will get some of it, and telling the rest to "trust the spiral," meaning trust that when they hop, skip, and jump over multiple topics the following year and the year after that, most of them will eventually "get" most of the stuff.

The result is that many parents just teach their kids real math outside of school. Many in our neighborhood send them to Chinese school, which teaches them math in addition to Chinese. The Chinese school buses line up in front of all of our local elementary schools at the end of each school day. (A lot of blond kids board those buses.) Some send them to Kumon, which is getting to be as common a sight around here as McDonalds or Starbucks.

I teach mine myself, using non-US curricula (Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean in my case.) I feel terrible for the kids who don't have parents doing the schools' job for them, whose math skills are limited to what they can pick up from their classmates in "group discovery" sessions, since the "professional educators" have now decided that kids learn best what they discover for themselves and now serve merely as "guides on the side" in edu- speak.

My son took his Chapter 9 test and reported to me that, with the exception of testing the two different, useless multiplication algorithms, the test was a DIFFERENT grab bag of unrelated math topics, bearing little resemblance to the study guide. Totally typical of "reform math." He did fine, but only because he had learned all of it outside school. His friends who rely on what they learn at school think he's a genius.

So kids go through this ridiculous joke of a math education and can't do math. The school points at their friends who did just fine (because--shh!--they learned math elsewhere), the school takes credit for having taught them so well and tells the others and their parents, "well, not all kids are equally good at math, but many of your classmates learned quite well," clearly implying that the kids who didn't are somehow defective.

The result is that those kids will soon be saying, "I'm just no good at math." What a disgrace.

<comment><USER11> Any chance you could link me to the non-US curricula materials you use to teach your kid?

I found a lot of the things you talked about in this school's approach to education: <http://www.russianschool.com/about-us/our-approach>

<comment><USER10> I can't link you to the Chinese or Japanese materials, because I bought them in Shanghai and Tokyo. Also, they aren't written in English. The Googlers next door use Russian materials from Moscow, also not written in English.

It's hard to do better than Singaporean materials, which are in English and modified (not in a bad way) for the US market, which you can find at SingaporeMath.com. Their Primary Mathematics series is superb. I use the Standards Edition, which is said to track the California State Math Standards. That sounds ominous, but actually the state standards are excellent. The districts essentially ignore them by using a ridiculous "reform" curriculum that, being "a mile wide and an inch deep," will always include a checkmark every year for any topic you can think of, thereby covering anything mentioned in the state standards (superficially and in random order).

Note that for these Asian curricula, you REALLY need to know how to teach the math. The textbooks only provide visual aids and example problems, not the tutorial text (paragraphs of explanation) typical in US books. If you go for Singapore Math, you should get the Home Instructors Guide (at least for a few levels), which teaches you how to teach it.

And DON'T start a kid at too high a level. Use the placement tests downloadable from singaporemath.com to decide where to start. It's all about carefully building up from the bottom, mastering each level before moving on.

<comment><USER11> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had a trig/pre-calc teacher in high school who I really respected. He had a catchphrase in his classes, especially in the earlier math classes. "In my class, there are only two kinds of people: those who love math, and those who are going to learn to love math." I only had the one class with him, but he left a huge impression on my life. He was convinced that computers were going to become essential to education, so he spent his department's entire budget for a year on two spankin' new Apple ][+ computers. Just set them on carts in his classroom and didn't touch them. He knew he didn't need to. Eventually, a handful of us approached him to ask if he could teach us to use them. "No," he responded. "I don't know anything about them myself... but they came with a tutorial, so maybe you could teach yourself how to write programs, and then maybe help me out."

That changed the course of my life. I was planning to be a lawyer, catering to artists and performers. My time spent learning to write programs led to my taking a number of computer science classes in my undergrad, for the easy grades they represented, which then led to majoring in CS, and, eventually, opting for a career in software development.

All of which is just to say that, if someone feels that they cannot "do" math, maybe they missed out on the right math teachers; those who understand kids and know how to motivate them and who have their own love for the subject matter and are able to infect others with it. If their math teacher(s) couldn't be bothered to make personal connections with their students, nor find any way at all to make math relevant to their lives, it shouldn't come as a surprise if they wind up being uninterested in "doing" math.

<comment><USER13> What a wonderful person. I sometimes take the time to contact teachers that have made an impact in my professional/personal life and thank them for setting me on the right course. It's a really simple gesture but they are always thrilled to hear they've made a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The key problem with math is that the learning keeps going and at some point, every single person fails to either have the ability or time to learn more math. Everyone becomes "bad at math" relative to other people. This same thing doesn't happen with reading because once you are a pretty good reader you feel like you have mastered it.

3 examples: 1) Kid who never completes pre-calc. "can't do math" 2) Adult who gets through calc, but doesn't go any further "can't do math"... like an engineer 3) Math PhD. who gets stuck on something they can't solve.

Person 1 and 2 are both stating they can't do math, and both people are relatively right. Relatively being the key word.

If we rephrased the way math is taught, it would never be labeled as math at all. This would box people in to saying things like "I don't do calculus" which would be correct in many cases, whereas it would be alarming if someone said "I can't add".

Really, whether people say "I don't do math" or "my bad" doesn't really matter and being stressed over it is probably just as ridiculous as saying those things.

<comment><USER15> This can't be overemphasized. My favorite (apocryphal) Einstein anecdote is the one where a society matron approaches him at a party and exclaims, "I don't know how you can deal with all that math. I have _so_ much trouble with math." Einstein replies, "Lady, you can't imagine how much trouble _I_ have with it."

s/math/computers, and that line comes in very handy in my own social life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Indeed there is something wrong with someone saying "I can't do math..." but it is not what the author identifies.

In blunt summary, the author says "you may not be able to do the specific math you claim, but don't worry I'll teach you." In my experience this is not at all what the complaint is saying and the solution "I'll teach you" is not at all what they are looking for. The comparison to illiteracy is completely off- target.

In my experience, "I can't do math" is simply "I don't know" in disguise. Ask most children: "what's 300 times 248" and you get a knee-jerk "I don't know". Ask also "what's a balloon made of"; "I don't know". Same goes for many other questions that appear to them to have a definite answer. We excuse children for saying this, but it becomes less and less acceptable as an answer because we learn of tools for finding the correct answers.

The real lesson that needs to be taught is:

Your worldview of can/can't do math is wrong. Doing math is learning what tools to use after we've broken down our question to its core...kind of like everything else.

<comment><USER17> Saying "I don't know" is a fantastic skill that children are born with but have it beaten out of them into adulthood and the beating never stops. I have deep respect for people who can say "I don't know." That person is one step away from learning something new.

<comment><USER16> It's great when adults who do not usually say "I don't know" can admit to not knowing something. Other than that, I cannot agree with anything else you say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My favorite story about how Ernst Kummer [1] did arithmetic, from Hoffman's _The Man Who Loved Only Numbers_ [2]:

"One story has him standing before a blackboard, trying to compute 7 times 9. "Ah," Kummer said to his high school class, "7 times 9 is eh, uh, is uh...." "61," one of his students volunteered. "Good," said Kummer, and wrote 61 on the board. "No," said another student, "it's 69." "Come, come, gentlemen," said Kummer, "it can't be both. It must be one or the other." (Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.' ") "

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Kummer>

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Loved-Only- Numbers/dp/B004R6HX...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Loved-Only- Numbers/dp/B004R6HXRQ/)

<comment><USER19> > Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: > "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a > prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is > too big-that leaves only 63.'

That's how I do problems like that, too (I am not a genius mathematician), and it is exactly the sort of thinking that kids should be doing all through K-12. Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern matching, logic, etc.

<comment><USER20>
      > Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern
      > matching, logic, etc.

Alas, most of the things on your list require a pretty solid foundation to work. You need patterns already committed into your brain to do pattern matching and to see analogy, you need to have internalized experience for intuition to work, you need to have previous exposure for any meaningful estimation. All to often people forget foundation when they move to the upper layers and sadly sometimes this leads to thinking that foundation is not necessary. And now matter how you look at it there will always be bits of the foundation that require rote learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is not that people can't do math. It is that other people (who supposedly can but in fact cannot OR will not do them properly) insist on them doing the math they do not need (like computing the second derivative of the unemployment rate) or doing wrong the math they DO need (like with their mortgages).

As long as people can add, subtract, multiply and basically understand what a division is, they can do math. The problem is they are scared at what other people tell them 'math' is.

I am a mathematician, a professor of mathematics and witness to what I have said.

Of course people cannot do 'math' when 'math' means being able to compute multiple integrals or roots of third degree polynomials. That is not 'math' that is UTTER RUBBISH EXCEPT FOR PROFESSIONALS in all caps. Really.

You do not expect the average man to be able to write a sonnet with alliteration, second order metaphors and in iambic, do you? And they call themselves "literate".

People are not lazy, they are scared. An the blame falls on BAD MATHS TEACHERS, in all caps. Really.

<comment><USER22> Hi, I'm a former (high school & middle school) math teacher. I taught various ages, but was only ever responsible for curriculum with age 10-11.

We studied a lot of fractions, decimals, percentages & converting between them. There was a bit of angle stuff mixed in there, too.

I love mathematics, so I think I'd be the sort of teacher you could see eye- to-eye with. What should I be doing differently?

<comment><USER21> Hi! That is exactly what they need: fractions are just a way to explain division and it helps them a lot (actually they are the basis for the "rule of three" which is the "fifth rule").

Proportions. Trying to start with square (?) triangles and the idea of similarity of triangles so that they can later (when 12-13) understand trigonometry (the basics) which, once again, is PROPORTIONALITY. There is little more to 'maths' than that.

What I object to is the unnecessary abstraction. Getting 10-11s to perform correct computations is hard but exactly what they need: lots of exercises (no sweat no learn or whatever).

You are a HERO. Really. In all caps My respect. I teach undergrads and this is way easier.

<comment><USER22> Aw! This was super kind, and I like the idea of stressing proportionality. It's nice to be told that the abstraction can wait - I've felt like I should be abstracting more at times, but it's not my natural instinct, so it's nice to be told I'm doing things right on that front! I feel the same way about anyone who can teach older (or younger!) mathematicians - keep on keeping on.

<comment><USER21> [A night later]

Oh, I really mean it. Teachers to children (and especially maths teachers) are essential for our society, and have one of the hardest job.

Focusing on proportions you can teach almost anything: from basic triangle geometry, including elements of what later they will know as 'trigonometry', to interest rates -even letting the best get the scent of 'compound interests'-, to areas & volumes to the notion of 'speed' as a ratio, to how to save money for the future... There is little more a normal 'literate' person needs to know, as I see it.

However, it takes quite an effort getting them to actually perform the computations. This is where 'good' -appealing- exercises and problems are required, and this is where the teacher's craftmanship comes into play. A good craftman will find the correct and 'fancyful' exercises, according to the class, the student, the time... You know, this is where the 'heroism' takes place.

All the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The underlying problem is two-fold in my opinion.

#1 We focus on teaching procedures rather than understanding. Most people therefore view math as a list of memorized fixed procedures, and that's intrinsically very hard to remember and become good at.

#2 Math is simple in a way our brains are not wired to be good at, yet we have a mistaken belief that simple is easy. It is not. Adding 1000 numbers by hand and getting the right answer is very simple, but hard. Recognizing my voice is very complex, but easy. Be aware that your brain is working in a way it is not designed to work and have patience with it. Otherwise you'll get frustrated, and mistake "It took me this long to understand something THIS simple?" for, "I'm stupid!"

The result is that most people understand math in a way that is hard, and their experience of math is an experience of repeatedly confirming the message that they are stupid. Is there any wonder that they take that frustration out on the entire subject of mathematics?

</comment><comment><USER24> I only think the author forgot that there are people that REALLY cannot do math.

It might sound bizarre and weird, but I met more than once person, that did their best to learn, and were intelligent with many other things (one of these persons had a degree in law, another in international relations, and was doing a masters in international law), yet could not do 29/3 without a calculator...

Or even worse, I knew people (in that case usually working with more low level work, like burger flipping) that even trying, or even if needed (ie: cashiers) cannot do it right even with a calculator, their grasp of math is so weak (even if they want to have a grasp) that they cannot even use the correct operations.

Also the same apply to many other fields, I knew intelligent people that could not read, or that could not grasp history, or geography, and so on...

People keep forgetting that brains CAN be very specialized, and be great with something, and terrible with other, and I personally believe that the old way of teaching professions (ie: throw the kid to work with a Master in that profession) was better because of that, currently you throw kids on the school, and the ones that might excel at some things that are not on school (like Music) reach adulthood thinking they are dump and they don't make a effort even in thinks they do have a talent to do.

<comment><USER25> > It might sound bizarre and weird, but I met more than once person, that did > their best to learn, and were intelligent with many other things (one of > these persons had a degree in law, another in international relations, and > was doing a masters in international law), yet could not do 29/3 without a > calculator...

There are multiple ways to learn even something like arithmetic.

Some people can naturally juggle a lot of numbers in their head and can basically brute force problems.

Others can break problems down into component pieces, work out each individual piece, and reassemble them into an answer. This requires a different type of mental juggling than the above.

And then there are those who just have to memorize a lot of problems.

When I was in school, we started off with memorization (multiplication tables and such), which requires a _large_ time investment that I am sure many students did not make. (My peer group tended to stay inside during recces and practice our multiplication!) After that I think we were supposed to "naturally" progress to breaking problems down into parts, but that was never really covered all that well. From what I understand, other countries make this part of learning arithmetic very explicit.

A good deal of this involves training ones working memory. Right at the end of college my working memory for numbers was amazing, I could do 3 digit divides in my head, and at one point I could even do a binary search to find logarithms down to a decimal place or two!

But as with many other skills, they degrade from a lack of use.

29/3? I have a minor on mathematics. If you give me that problem, I'd honestly type "win-r calc 29/3 enter".

Now days I have problems just adding up large strings of numbers, I play a bunch of D10 games and I have to actually do math rather than it coming to me instantly!

> People keep forgetting that brains CAN be very specialized, and be great > with something, and terrible with other,

Well yes of course, but we choose what to specialize in! I really do believe that anyone can learn math if they put the time and effort into it. My math classes took 2-3 hours a day of studying a good 4 days a week in order for me to completely grasp the concepts being taught.

Repetition of hundreds of problems, as much as I hated it, was the only real way to burn technique into my head, and even then most of those techniques have fallen by the way side! A few still bounce around inside my skull, but it has been a good 8 years since my last math class, so the amazing feats of mental gymnastics I could perform are long gone.

On the flip side, ask me to design a test infrastructure for code sometime, and I'm right on it! How about a custom memory allocation scheme? No problem! Specialization indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seymour Papert (<http://www.papert.org/>), inventor of Logo in his seminal work Mindstorms (1980) did a very good job on analyzing this phenomena.

Not only he did a great analysis on children but also came up with Logo, one of the best paradigm-changing environments for teaching math.

On his second book, The Children's Machine (1991), almost 11 years later he went deeper into the issue of computer's at schools and what should or shouldn't be taught at school on math lectures. There's a nice section on an experiment involving hat he called "Kitchen Math" which served to evidence that a constructivist approach is inevitably better than memorizing formulas, rules and formal stuff.

I recommend both books to anyone interested in this topic.

Here is a link to an essay written by Dr. Papert in 1996: [http://papert.org/articles/AnExplorationintheSpaceofMathemat...](http://papert.org/articles/AnExplorationintheSpaceofMathematicsEducations.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> I went through this exact issue with a junior employee moved to my team to do some analysis that required a basic understanding of medians/means and a little intro stats.

It took about 8 weeks of tasks with incremental mathematical challenges to overcome this, and at least reach the point where he could do his work, and apply the fundamentals learned to solving more complex problems.

In the end he "could do math", the real issue was he had never "put any work into math".

</comment><comment><USER28> Telling people they can do math because they can add is disingenuous at best.

"Ciphering" is the term that used to be used for figuring sums and such. Nobody pretended that was math. At the school house it was called "arithmetic". It was one of the three "R's" not something with it's own Phd granting departments at universities.

People who say they cannot do math are speaking with the knowledge that they are looking up toward a massive intellectual edifice containing ideas they do not understand - whether they are looking up to high-school trigonometry or differential equations or Bayesian statistics is irrelevant.

What is relevant is that they are not looking up to ciphering as unobtainable - at least not those people likely to be conversing causally or academically with a tenure track academic.

</comment><comment><USER29> When `she' said "I hate math".

Read as: I hate the public school/university mathematics rote droning pretentious pedagogy ecosystem.

I personally still retain a enthusiastic thread of the childlike wonder and delight 15 contiguous years in classroom minefields attempted to lame, but its `opportunity cost' has been expensive.

Today's increasing autodidact free materials eliminates this cost.

</comment><comment><USER30> It traces back to cultural and educational issues.

Math has typically been taught devoid of any context or relevance to our everyday lives. Even in college, you just mindlessly plug and chug formulas to get by. Some students don't see the use in it, beyond perhaps the parts needed for basic financial literacy (which many do not have, either).

Better and more engaging and relevant and effective ways to teach math have already been developed, such as Realistic Mathematics Education.

But people actually say things like "I can't do math" in regards to all forms of literacy, I believe. It depends what standards you are mentally comparing yourself to, I guess, such as professional vs. social standards.

"I'm not good with money, or I'm not good with the business stuff" - <USER2> literacy

"I can't write" - as in, I can't write books or novels or easily do other professional writing tasks. Again, there are pedagogical techniques that can help students write more, write better, and have more interest and confidence in writing.

"I don't read" - most folks nowadays don't really read books or novels anymore, what with TV, movies, and the Internet.

"I don't know computers" - how often do we hear that - that's computer literacy. I hear it less and less though nowadays.

To tell you the truth, maybe it will be nice when one day people feel forced to admit "I can't code." Because that would mean that programming and computational literacy is something taught in most schools.

<comment><USER31> > most folks nowadays don't really read books or novels anymore, what with TV, > movies, and the Internet.

Reading off of a screen is still reading. I don't know why some people think paper is magical.

<comment><USER32> Sadly, most of what is on the internet counts as reading the same as watching a spongebob episode and "The Stand" both count as watching a 'show.'

It's telling when writing a 3-4 paragraph article requires a ;TLDR section.

Usually when a person says they are a "reader," or the like, are specifically talking about long works, not articles in Maxim magazine.

<comment><USER31> > It's telling when writing a 3-4 paragraph article requires a ;TLDR section.

You mean humans are still lazy mammals as opposed to being industrious insects? Say it isn't so!

The rest of your post has nothing to do with the Internet. People read Maxim both online and off. We haven't changed.

<comment><USER32> My post was, in context, not about the Internet, it was in response to your comment in reference to:

"most folks nowadays don't really read books or novels anymore, what with TV, movies, and the Internet."

Comparing reading a 3-4 paragraph article on HN (or elsewhere) as being the same as reading a book or novel, the "rest of my post" was an anology.

True, those people that don't read ebooks or longer articles propably were not reading books or novels to begin with, so it is a win for literacy, but its just as likely they just shifted to that because it's easier to read an article off their phone while shitting than turning the pages of a physical magazine.

So TLDR; Reading articles online isn't the same level of effort as reading a book, which your comment seemed to support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This reminds me of my experience with people in China when I was there. My friends there told me that many young people in China do understand English. But every time I approached them with "Do you speak English?" They usually took two steps backward and replied "no". They hesitate speaking English (because they find it difficult) despite knowing enough to serve my purpose.

I have had similar experience with "Do you know maths?" in the US.

</comment><comment><USER34> Really good book on the subject that deals with why/ramifications of a society that's okay with "I can't do math" as a reasonable thing for an otherwise educated person.

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences John Allen Paulos [http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy- Its...](http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Its- Consequences/dp/0809058405)

</comment><comment><USER22> One fun parallel - not to literacy, but to another skill at which artsy types are often better than mathematicians - is the oft-repeated, and completely acceptable, "I can't read minds".

Lots of people can read minds. Not literally, of course, but they've put in the work (and perhaps it was work that they found easy and pleasant, much as many programmers found math) to be able to essentially tell what people want, don't want, are implying, will be offended by, etc. Yet I've certainly heard plenty of people, and especially STEM-types, making a point of pride about lacking this skill: "I'm a straight-shooter" and the like. There's aspergers and there's dyscalculia, but many STEM types who happily admit to lacking this skill are just like those whom the author bemoans - they find it difficult and uninteresting. And that's okay! But it's no truer, really, than "I can't do maths".

</comment><comment><USER35> When I hear, "I can't do math...", it gets immediately translated in my head to, "My math skill are on the level of a typical 5th grader, and I don't want to be asked to do math because it will expose an embarrassing ignorance." The author's approach to people that feel this way is likely to humiliate them further.

</comment><comment><USER36> This sounds like an extension of the recently widely covered practice of not telling your kids they're smart. Basically, studies have shown that praising your child for intelligence as opposed to hard work can cause them to undervalue effort. They start to separate subjects into things they are "good" at and things they are "bad" at. They then avoid the things they've labeled themselves as bad at doing.

On the contrary, praising a child for their hard work seems to not be associated with this same negative behavior. [http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/02/why-you- should...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/02/why-you-shouldnt- tell-your-kids-theyre-smart/)

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn Yeah, I didn't like this article. It's overly harsh and doesn't take into account other situations. I have dyscalculia, the math version of dyslexia. People generally don't say "I can't do English" if they have dyslexia, but they can say, "I can't spell" which I wonder would be assessed as harshly by the author as this article.

Also, it was pointed out that what math is can be fuzzy - I always thought I was BAD at math, when I was young and it was still adding numbers together and stuff, which I only can do with great difficulty. Once I got into algebra, I was already devising my own ways to solve equations and acing the class (although they told me to stop solving the equations in my own way...)

</comment><comment><USER37> I feel like the sentiment of "I can't do math" stems mostly from the way math is taught. To contrast we can look at how reading is taught to elementary students. Students read books at their "level." Once they are comfortable with the words and concepts in a given level then the difficulty of the content is scaled up appropriately. In math, students are often pulled along with the rest of the class. It is very difficult to understand division when you are still struggling to understand subtraction. This happens for a number of reasons but mostly because it is more difficult to teach math on an individual level the way reading can be though. I think that the solution to issues like this will/would look similar to the reverse model that the folks at KahnAcademy are creating. It's clear that it is difficult to teach math of every student is at a different point and understands a different amount of math. By transferring the teaching onto prerecorded videos the students are able to learn at their own pace and rewatch the lessons for more difficult concepts without exasperating the teacher. Salman Kahn has stated that his cousin (that he first started making videos for) told him that she liked learning from him in his videos more because he wouldn't get frustrated when she didn't understand a concept. She could just watch it again. This also frees the teacher to help the students who are learning at a slower rate or have gotten stuck with a difficult concept.

</comment><comment><USER38> We seem to accept what's essentially illiteracy in all the subjects that require more precise thinking as the status quo. Most people don't seem to understand much about chemistry, physics, logic or computers either, and that doesn't get them in for a lot of stick.

If people are poorly taught and have gaps in their understanding that are never adequately addressed, then I can see how they'd think that the problem was them - that they couldn't do maths. Couldn't make the connections that were expected of them and portrayed as normal functioning for maths.

Maths is different to history, and many other subjects, in that regard. If you don't understand something in history, it probably doesn't have a massive list of dependencies that you're going to fail a lot of stuff in the future on. If you don't understand something in English, the worst that's going to happen is you have an esoteric interpretation of the text. You can still do those subjects if you don't really understand them, as long as you use the right buzzwords and hook them off the right things.

I suspect part of the answer may just be that admitting you can't do history or the like is different to admitting that you can't do maths in that it's unclear what someone would even mean by claiming that they can do history. Certainly the claim that someone knows a lot about the broad strokes of history would rarely be justified these days.

</comment><comment><USER39> I do like the author's comparison to illiteracy. Language, just like mathematics, tries to solve the problem of communication but while language is more about the expression of emotions, thoughts, and feelings, mathematics is meant to describe precise ideas and abstractions in a quantified way. While language can be ambiguous in how it relays our true intentions, mathematics is anything but. It is the only method humanity has that, through experiment and observation, can help us reach for and perhaps even attain absolute truth.

Just like reading/writing, you don't learn mathematics (real maths, not arithmetic) to be able to scribble symbols on a piece of paper. You learn it to develop a way of thinking that promotes certainty and helps you develop and understand complex abstract ideas that describe how the world works. When you dive deep into math (or programming for that matter), you don't just learn a subject, your brain actually reconfigures itself and fundamentally changes how you act and think. This effect, called neuroplasticity, functions pretty much until you die so it's never too late to learn math.

When someone says that they can't "do" math it says nothing about their intellect. All it says is that they didn't like the mathematical equivalent of "The Cat in the Hat" taught in primary school and are now going to live (many quite proudly) without the mental faculties to express and grok abstract and complicated ideas and systems. Sadly, now more than ever, we need each and every human to have these faculties if we are going to survive and thrive as individuals and as a species.

</comment><comment><USER40> > _But many people feel the same way about, for example, physical exercise: > they don't enjoy doing it and find it to be very hard work when they try. > But it would be strange indeed to say that you can't "do" exercise. You may > not want to do it. You may be unwilling to invest the time and effort into > doing it. But you aren't incapable of doing it. And the same is true, in my > experience, in mathematics._

I think a more apt comparison might be to sports, rather than to exercise. Everyone can get reasonably good at "exercise" i.e. be able to run a mile in a reasonable time, but I think we can all agree that there are certainly many people who simply "can't do" a sport.

For example, I am pretty bad at baseball. I was a terrible batter and an even worse fielder. I "persevered" and played Little League Baseball for several years, eventually realized I didn't have much if any aptitude for it, and stopped playing altogether. Does this mean I'm lazy or that the Little League coaching system is broken? No, it just means I'm not that good at baseball and probably never will be, and I don't think any amount of great coaching would have changed that.

Are there some people who could have been good at a given sport but "slip through the cracks" due to laziness or bad teaching? Maybe, but I doubt it's a significant number.

It's easy to take mathematics ability for granted on a focused forum like HN, but perhaps being good at math is no different from being a great sports athlete - Some people are really good at it, but most aren't and it's pretty unrealistic to expect everyone to change their expectations and opinions on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER41> Totally relevant: <http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1356>

</comment><comment><USER42> _> But many people feel the same way about, for example, physical exercise: they don't enjoy doing it and find it to be very hard work when they try. But it would be strange indeed to say that you can't "do" exercise. You may not want to do it. You may be unwilling to invest the time and effort into doing it. But you aren't incapable of doing it. And the same is true, in my experience, in mathematics._

The way physical exercise is often presented to people, it's no surprise they give up on it. A lot of gimmicky exercise programs and contraptions designed to take money from you in exchange for no visible results.

And even time tested exercise programs like P90X won't teach you the fundamentals. You'll spend a lot of time doing crunches which is the least effective and most time consuming way of working abs.

The same is certainly true for math and when people say they can't do any moderately complex math, they're saying "fuck you" to the establishment that wasted their time while teaching them nothing. They also do just fine without complex math, just like most people who never exercise.

</comment><comment><USER43> Neil Degrasse Tyson made this point.

He basically said that imagine if instead of people saying at cocktail parties "I can't do math" they said "I can't read..."

<comment><USER44> Sure, but "I can't do math" is a shorthand for "I can't do math beyond arithmetic, and even then, I often can't do that in my head." That is not equivalent to "I can't read." It is more equivalent to "I can't read Proust without getting bored and confused."

The author in the OP acknowledges this substitution of "I can't" for "I currently struggle with." It's complaint about semantics that misses the point, I think.

Rather than complaining when people say they can't do math, we should find out why they feel that way. I suspect a large part of the reason is that math education is pedantic and boring (memorizing axioms and doing rote calculations, when we should prove them, for example, or apply math in ways that doesn't involve trains leaving stations) and when people do speak their minds about their difficulties with mathematics, they often face snooty responses like this one in the OP, rather than a lighter touch.

<comment><USER45> One of the OP's main gripes is that many people will gleefully, happily tell you that they can't do math. Nobody will ever admit to a stranger at a cocktail party that they're illiterate but being bad at math is, for some reason, a conversation starter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > So what do people actually mean when they say that they can't 'do' math?

That I "can't". That my brain is differently "shaped", simply, and that this a common variation.

Personally I think in spatial 3d structures, classify images, read superfast recognising words by the shape of the contour of the letters, learn at a good rate and can accurately drawn what I see in the real world...

But in the other hand I find deadly boring to express, in a unnecesarily complicated formulae drawn in 2d with many arcane symbols, a simple concept that could be introduced and expressed instead in two or three simple phrases... or logically, graphically...

The "atoms" of my thinking process are shapes and relationships between shapes, not abstract quantities. Is as simply as this. Other people "think in sounds" and are very good at music, and other "think in mathematical structures". I'm not blaming nobody, not excuses... I'm just a perfectly normal human with an intelligence basically visual

(... And I prefer not spend much time with this when a machine can do the math part for me in the blink of an eye).

</comment><comment><USER47> I believe that lots of people really can't do math. Most people are fine until fractions. Many people never gain any intuitive feel for what "2/5 * 7/8" even means. It only gets worse with algebra. They can often learn the mechanics of fraction arithmetic and solving equations, but they will never understand how to apply the knowledge later in life.

</comment><comment><USER48> "I can't do math" actually means "I both don't like to and don't believe I really need to do any math, so I'm going to say 'I can't do math' to cut you off before you propose I do any."

Of course college-educated people _can_ do a little math - but they don't like to, so they don't.

</comment><comment><USER49> I sympathize with the OP on all he says, but what does he mean by this, aren't these expressions synonymous, the only difference being the tone?:

> although saying "my bad" when you mean "my mistake" comes close

...and going further on the linguistic ambiguity route, most people saying "can't do" actually mean simply "I hate it / I'm not good at it, and because it's so much effort for met o do it I'd rather not have to do it"... and the only bad thing in it is the uberannoying implied "I don't want to learn it, don't try and teach it to me"...

<comment><USER50> 'My bad' is a foolish thing to get upset about people saying. People have said it for thousands of years and they're going to keep saying it. See: "Mea Culpa"

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think these people mean "I can't do arithmetic" which is much more acceptable, in my opinion. If you asked me to find a derivative, I could probably do it faster than I could find 123*26. It's not because the multiplication is harder, but because I don't have to do it in my head that often anymore. I have a calculator, and I use it. However, I have to do derivatives in math class everyday and at this point I'm probably faster at it. Not being able to do arithmetic is fine by me, I can't do it.

<comment><USER52> That's just because there are fewer steps for finding a simple derivative.

If you evaluate 123 _26 in your head, most people probably end up thinking through something like this

        123 * 20 + 123 * 6

        123 * 20
        123 * 10 * 2
        1230 * 2
        2460 Now remember this part

        123 * 6

        100*6 + 20*6 + 3*6
        100*6 = 600
        20*6 = 120
        3*6 = 18
        600+120+18
        738

        2460 + 738 = 3198

Now compare that to taking a simple derivative.

Although I could ask you to take the derivative of 123x^26.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> There is an idea that pervades their rant that all people are more or less equally educable in all subjects. In my experience this is simply not true.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think part of the problem is we don't teach Math in a way that is visual/obvious enough, which means early math is experienced as 'mechanics' not 'understanding'.

For example, we should explain commutative rule [ a(b+c)=ab+ac ] by drawing the rectangles.

My efforts to help this in some way : GridMaths.com [ sample pics + blurb : quantblog.wordpress.com ]

</comment><comment><USER55> Math is just another word for structured thought. When people say they're not good at math, what they really mean is that they attempted learn something without understanding the underlying principles, and therefore found it difficult.

They're not lazy, they're just ignorant to the process because they were taught incorrectly.

</comment><comment><USER56> Yeah, it's interesting that people will proudly admit "I can't do math" but you don't nearly as often hear them say "I don't understand politics, government, or world affairs." People will do their damnedest to appear knowledgeable about those things.

<comment><USER17> That's true. "I don't really understand national politics in any deep way," is something I've said many times and has been responded to often with "me neither", but I'm quite sure had I not said it, the person would've kept quiet about their ignorance and feigned insight in other conversations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Maybe they should teach it as 'modelling' instead of 'mathematics.' When you start thinking of it in terms of interpreting real world dynamics and relationships, curiosity takes over and it becomes a much more compelling subject to learn. IMO.

</comment><comment><USER58> Surely if effort and attention to detail were applied most of these people could work their way through whatever math task was set before them. What they should instead be saying is; "I don't do math".

</comment><comment><USER59> But If a person says "I can't \"do\" mathematics" also could imply that the person would like to like it, or maybe the person at least respect the subject as important.

<comment><USER60> how did these added slashes slip in?

<comment><USER19> Java/C++ programmer who observed that English lacks Perl's qq operator or python's r''

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I never learned how to do long division by hand. That doesn't mean I can't do math, though. I could, of course, learn how, but I haven't needed to.

</comment><comment><USER62> As I did the last time I posted a reply about mathematics education, I read the original post and the comments here before posting this reply.

First things first. Mathematical notation is now universal. A student in China learns in middle school (junior high) most of the mathematical notation that an American is expected to learn by graduation from high school. I know a large number of Chinese people who have taken the GRE test for admission to United States graduate schools. All of them, even those pursuing graduate studies in humanities, deride the GRE math section as "junior high math," which it literally is in terms of the standard school curriculum in China. Not all people in China have access to schooling beyond junior high, but through junior high the instruction in mathematics is generally excellent, and the United States could learn from the methods of mathematics teaching used in schools in China.

[http://stuff.mit.edu:8001/afs/athena/course/6/6.969/OldFiles...](http://stuff.mit.edu:8001/afs/athena/course/6/6.969/OldFiles/www/readings/ma- review.pdf)

<http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf>

Second things second. There is indeed a distinction between doing the kinds of calculations in arithmetic that may be tested in elementary school, are often done by adults with electronic calculators, and may or may not be a practiced skill of professional mathematicians and the kind of mathematical reasoning that makes up university-level study of mathematics and quantitative sciences. But that is not to say that learning arithmetic is not important. W. Stephen Wilson, a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, surveyed mathematics researchers about a year after the webpage submitted here was written, and asked them to agree or disagree with the statement

"In order to succeed at freshmen mathematics at my college/university, it is important to have knowledge of and facility with basic arithmetic algorithms, e.g. multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, and algebra, (without having to rely on a calculator."

<http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/list>

His colleagues around the world unanimously agreed, answered him in terms such as

"I am shocked that there is any issue here. I absolutely agree with your statement."

"That it is even slightly in doubt is strong evidence of very distorted curriculum decisions. I do not know even one university-level teacher of mathematics who would disagree with it. I would be truly astonished to meet a person who disagrees."

The charming story about Kummer is one I tell my own students, but I also tell them that the mathematics I teach them (prealgebra mathematics, in a class for self-selected elementary-age pupils looking for a challenging mathematics course) is based on their doing their own calculations with their minds alone, or with pencil and paper, never with a calculator.

Other mathematicians point out that learning the long division algorithm is itself a basis for the development of mathematical understanding.

<http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/longdivision.pdf>

The late mathematician W. W. Sawyer spent decades thinking about how to teach mathematics effectively.

<http://www.marco-learningsystems.com/pages/sawyer/sawyer.htm>

Back in 2004, when I joined the Art of Problem Solving forums, I chose the screen name "tokenadult" (which so annoys some people here, chosen there because many participants on the forums are much younger than I am), and also chose a tagline quotation from Sawyer:

"The proper thing for a parent to say is, 'I did badly at mathematics, but I had a very bad teacher. I wish I had had a good one.'" W. W. Sawyer, Vision in Elementary Mathematics (1964), page 5.

Sawyer didn't want parents to give their children an excuse for thinking "I don't have a head for mathematics." Instead, a learner can keep searching for an effective teacher, and learn more than at first seems possible. The curriculum expectations in much of the English-speaking world are meager. In both Singapore and Taiwan (and in some other countries), every seventh grader is expected to learn algebra, and a fair amount of geometry--even all of the below-average students. That is possible. Not everyone in those countries is brilliant in mathematics, but many, many people in those countries have a day- by-day correct understanding of mathematics that helps in their daily life activities. My wife received that kind of mathematical education back when Taiwan is wretchedly poor. Taiwan is no longer poor, in part because it has developed rapidly through its educated workforce.

<comment><USER9> I was educated in the UK and given (in my estimation) very poor maths instruction. I stopped studying maths at the earliest opportunity. My undergraduate degree was in the humanities.

Even for me, someone who identifies as being very bad at math, the math section of the GRE was not challenging in the least, even though I had done literally no preparation. (I was applying for a course that required all applicants to take the GRE, even though it wasn't considered at all in the entry process. Apparently it had something to do with funding.)

I guess my point is, I find it difficult to imagine _anyone_ who had completed a degree and was sitting the GRE would find the math section anything beyond elementary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> "I can't do math [at a university level]..."

</comment><comment><USER4> Indeed, it is often beneficial to state your preferences up front instead of sputtering nonsense trying to be "diplomatic".

Everyone can interpret what I have to say about text editors much more usefully if I state up front that I love Emacs. The same goes for programming languages, frameworks, operating systems and math.

</comment><comment><USER64> I wish i could do math</comment>


Woman who designed Florida's Covid-19 dashboard removed from her position - <AUTHOR> https://cbs12.com/news/local/woman-who-designed-floridas-covid-19-dashboard-has-been-removed-from-her-position <comment><USER2> Rebekah Jones said in an email to CBS12 News that her removal was "not voluntary" and that she was removed from her position because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."

Wow. I don't even know what to say. This is horrible, and misinformation at its worst. I feel like this is the magic marker on the hurricane map that nobody can easily laugh at, because they can't see it.

<comment><USER3> If that is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), I hope that:

1) She will not be subject to long term repercussions for being honest and doing her job

2) Whoever asked her to cook the numbers, will be sued and arrested and go to jail. Cooking the numbers in this case equates to me as killing people, because decisions related to reopening, etc, will be heavily influenced by these numbers.

3) I hope that someone Rebekah Jones will know that unknown people in the internet, even in this obscure hacker site called Hacker News, are proud of what she stood for. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose, and yet she chose the right path. (again, assuming this is true)

<comment><USER4> Are you new to American politics? The demand to cook the books undoubtedly came from the top, whoever investigates can also be fired, and the public are out demanding that reopening happen even if it kills people.

<comment><USER5> Regardless of what happened to this woman, if the public wants the reopening, then by all means it should happen. The opposite, house arrest against the public wishes, is terrifying.

<comment><USER6> There have been several polls that show the public is happy with the lockdown, even Republicans.

<comment><USER5> I misunderstood what the gp meant by "the public are out demanding that reopening happens".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is the email she sent to the Florida Coronavirus listserv (copied from /u/aerlenbach on Reddit):

Hey all –

I've gotten a lot of emails from everyone during the last eight days ever since the dashboard went down, the data was hidden, and the functionality essentially crashed, so to clear up the confusion, I'm sending this final notice to the group.

For reasons beyond my division's control, as of late in the day on May 5, my office (the DOH-GIS office) is no longer managing the COVID-19 Dashboard. I am no longer involved in the publication of data, fixing errors, answering questions, etc., in any shape or form. I helped them get it back running a few times but I have no knowledge about their plans, what data they are now restricting, what data will be added and when, or any of that. I understand, appreciate, and even share your concern about all the dramatic changes that have occurred and those that are yet to come. However, I cannot provide any insight now or going forward.

As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it.

They are making a lot of changes. I would advise being diligent in your respective uses of this data. I know many of you have broken API links and map layers. I've listed the contacts for getting that information below.

The primary contacts going forward are listed below.

Anything related to EPI: REDACTED or REDACTED

Anything related to the technical aspects of the dashboard: REDACTED

It was great working with you guys. Good luck, and stay safe.

-30-

Rebekah Jones, GISP

GIS Manager| Division of Disease Control and Health Protection

PHONE # & EMAIL REDACTED

<comment><USER8> Reading the plain text of her letter, there is no accusation of wrongdoing, no cooking the numbers, etc. Rather it is a lot of innuendo. Which data to present and how is always an editorial decision as in the case of every other state's DOH website and every newspapers dashboard.

This is not a whistleblower complaint. It's only evidence of bad faith on the part of the governor if you come in assuming bad faith to begin with.

<comment><USER9> I think I've got a good guess what data she didn't want removed or changed, and it's not exactly good for her case. On May the 5th, they day she was removed from her position, there was an all-time high spike of 113 reported coronavirus deaths due to Florida reporting a bunch of old deaths all at once: [https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/15/florida- adds...](https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/15/florida- adds-43-coronavirus-deaths-as-state-continues-to-reopen/)

This did not represent an actual spike in deaths which had in reality been declining, but if I remember rightly some people did spin it as deaths increasing due to the lockdown being lifted. Deaths by date reported are conspicuously missing from the current version of the dashboard; it only has dates by date of death, which is far less favourable to the claim that lifting the lockdown is causing an increase in deaths.

<comment><USER10> I think that using date-of-report is better for lay-people. Pro/cons:

\- There's a one time spike when the methodology changes

= The data lags reality on the ground (true for both date-of-report and date- of-death)

\+ Past dates aren't updated, so there isn't a continuous bias to show a slowdown in the number of new deaths

I think that the last point is the most important because it's super easy for people to misinterpret provisional data. People were talking about covid-19 not causing excess mortality because using date-of-death always shows a dip for the present: [https://twitter.com/TylerMorganMe/status/1248452375162925057](https://twitter.com/TylerMorganMe/status/1248452375162925057)

You can also see the same thing in the top comment on this Euromomo thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866238)

> Another very surprising thing is to see no excess mortality in Sweden, a > country criticized for a laxer strategy against COVID-19. I was not > expecting to see that.

That was week 14 for [https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and- maps/](https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/) . In fact, week 14's excess death z-score for Sweden was in the "very high excess" category after the data was collected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Original link to the newspaper that broke the story: [https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/18/censorshi...](https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/18/censorship- covid-19-data-researcher-removed-florida-moves-re-open-state/5212398002/)

Local news is incredibly important. For instance, the Miami Herald's investigations uncovered the Epstein scandal: [https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> which one of us techies and software engineers would be brave enough to take the stand and risk our job?

how many of us would look the other way and make some excuse about how it's not our call and we are just doing our jobs?

i hope that if our time ever comes, we would all have the courage to stand up for the truth like she did.

<comment><USER13> In practice, it's very difficult fo make such decisions. I'm a young, single developer with other revenue streams. I am not risking a lot, so honesty and integrity are cheap.

However, many people don't have such a luxury, especially outside the tech community.

<comment><USER14> I think there's a u-shape here. Lots of jobs are disposable. Being the bartender at Chili's is not much different than being the bartender at Olive Garden. So there's lots of jobs on the low end where it's relatively easy to dump the job and get another. My intuition is that the middle has the hardest time, once you get enough job specialization and income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why are there no repurcussions for what essentially amounts to fraud? Why is it acceptable for politicians to commit fraud, but not for anyone else?

<comment><USER16> Repercussions based on a single person's unproven allegations? Would you like to live in a place where this is the norm?

<comment><USER17> I have to say I haven't followed this news that close but as far as I could understand most of the covid-related data for Florida plus some map layers are now gone/not accessible any more, so that proves that the most important allegation of this person is correct, i.e. the powers that be wanted the data closest to the truth not to be easily accessible anymore.

<comment><USER9> I can't figure out what data is actually missing for Florida. It looks like there's currently data on cases, hospitalizations and deaths at the county level, as well as historical data on new cases per day and deaths per day (by day of death). The only things that seems to be missing are historical deaths by date reported, historical hospitalizations, and historical county-level data, and most of those are likely to just be noise - admittedly, noise that would be very useful to publications cynically wanting to cherry-pick data and misrepresent it as evidence of a spike due to the reopening like they have with other states, but that doesn't seem like a reason why publishing it would help inform us.

(In fact, I think Florida was actually the state where people took a all-time high spike in newly-reported coronavirus deaths due to the state reporting a bunch of old deaths at once as proof reopening was killing people. And that spike happened on the same day - May the 5th - as this woman complained that she was supposedly removed for "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someone has posted an email on reddit claiming it was sent out by the woman in question:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/gmfkoa/woman_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/gmfkoa/woman_who_designed_floridas_covid19_dashboard_has/fr3dz42/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's an update and perhaps a broader perspective:

[https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24285125...](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242851256.html)

> _"Rebekah Jones exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her > time with the department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the > department's COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the > epidemiological team or her supervisors," Ferré said. "The blatant > disrespect for the professionals who were working around the clock to > provide the important information for the COVID-19 website was harmful to > the team. Accuracy and transparency are always indispensable, especially > during an unprecedented public health emergency such as COVID-19. Having > someone disruptive cannot be tolerated during this public pandemic, which > led the department to determine that it was best to terminate her > employment."_

So, depending on what you choose to believe at this point, you could also consider the possibility that she was making modifications to inflate the numbers and exaggerate the problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> Deeply unsettling to imagine that the US statistics aren't trustworthy.

<comment><USER20> Anyone ever believed them? Throughout March and most April, US statistics were essentially worthless because testing was not being done - and that (especially early) happened on purpose, so it pretty much amounts to lying.

<comment><USER21> Same for the UK - only reporting official in-hospital deaths that were tested, while limiting the number of tests.

Much harder to fix the ONS excess death stats, and those are now running at around 55,000.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, excess deaths are probably the only reliable metric we have anywhere at this point.

Over here in Poland, I've heard enough rumors in April that obviously- COVID-19-related deaths aren't counted as COVID-19 deaths because of a technicality, so I'm not giving much confidence to our official stats either. But it's harder to cook overall deaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If we want to progress as a society we must step up for transparency. This kind of deliberate misinformation is devastating

</comment><comment><USER23> Cory Doctorow wrote the following recently, which seems on topic for this thread:

[https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/volcano- gods/#reopening](https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/volcano-gods/#reopening)

<comment><USER24> That piece is spot on. The common theme is that a distributed value system based on personal gain is absolutely and totally at odds with preempting a pandemic. The economic interests of business owners and investors is directly at odds with the health and safety of the public. The market won't fix this. It will just price death in. And guess what? They're busy pushing that cost to zero through their corrupt influence on politicians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is hardly a surprise. Just because a bunch of screaming uneducated people demand to open the country, ( and have the support they need), doesn't mean it's the smart thing to do. Many people will be in jeopardy and it doesn't matter as long as they can keep the economy rolling. When people become so sick they can't buy things or go to work and the numbers get bigger, to big to hide...then things will get real. Everyone should be prepared for another setback because this is not going to just be...oh yeah all is back to normal guys! No worries....

</comment><comment><USER24> I have often wondered whether there are any objective criteria for judging intelligence at all, or whether it is all subjective. It must be the case that the success of accurately modeling the world around you, predicting the future of the world around you based on your model, and taking action to achieve an outcome is one way to evaluate intelligence. If we have two minds, and one is better at modeling and taking action and achieving its own desired outcomes, then it must be considered more intelligent, right? But here's the rub! Effective modeling cannot be done with garbage (or no) data. Literally choosing to have bad data cannot possibly lead to better decision-making, as the model is less and less accurate.

In other words, garbage in, garbage out. "Lalalala I can't hear you, you can't see me, we aren't dying" is an objectively stupid strategy. And it's leading to objectively bad results. Let me just say it bluntly. This is _stupid_. Please can we use that word again? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Infuriating.

</comment><comment><USER26> For the data scientists of HN - is it common for "the business" to exert influence on your data, so that it results in some conclusion that they want (rather than a truthful conclusion)? I knew a guy who dropped out of an ivy league phd because he was recruited by hedge fund to do data science stuff (no idea what) and he gave me the impression that most of his work was selectively choosing and presenting data that he knew would make management happy, and that he was rewarded with career advancement as a result.

So how common is this?

Side note - someone please hire Ms. Jones.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's getting harder to trust any data coming from state officials as they move to censor or manipulate it so that they can make a better case for reopening too soon. A lot of this tension can be seen as local governments attempt to implement their own coronavirus restrictions only for the state to override them like here in Texas.

I'm assuming the plan is that when we inevitably get hit by a second wave they can just blame the businesses or the counties for not doing a good enough job or something. Considering how much of a joke the reopening guidelines have been and how little the state is willing to enforce them.

<comment><USER28> I'll tell you this, as an anecdote, my mother works in a hospital in central Florida, in The Villages, the largest retirement community in the state. She says it's never been so slow. They've had to cut shifts, and she's seen worse flu seasons than what they went through over the past 2 months. They were never at more than 50% capacity. And they never had more than a dozen Covid patients at any given time.

<comment><USER29> Interesting, but perhaps that anecdote makes sense?

It's kind of middle of nowhere FL with a low population density.

Everyone is retired and the closest major airports are Tampa and Orlando (I think) and I suspect visitors/tourism to The Villages are relatively low in number.

Additionally, from what I last saw around 50% of confirmed cases were in South FL. Where there are major international airports, plentiful tourism, and greater population density.

<comment><USER28> These retirees are generally well off financially. They frequently return home to their families out of state and travel a lot whether by cruise, RV, or air. They dine out constantly and meet in the town squares for dancing and social activities in large numbers. I still strongly suspect there's some x-factor for Covid that protects people from it's worst effects. That could be vitamin D levels or some other vaccine they already received.

At any rate, this is why I argue each local community should deal with situation as it evolves. You can't pretend the virus is hitting everywhere equally at once and it makes no sense to shut businesses down when your local hospital is at less than 50% capacity.

<comment><USER30> Are they currently "dining out constantly and meeting in the town square for dancing"? I suspect they probably are aware of the high IFR in their demographic and acting accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> According to story, "COVID-19 dashboard designer faces cyber sexual harassment charges", say the Governor of Florida:

[https://cbs12.com/news/local/covid-19-dashboard-designer- fac...](https://cbs12.com/news/local/covid-19-dashboard-designer-faces-cyber- sexual-harassment-charges-desantis-says)

</comment><comment><USER32> No one seems to be asking what the data in question is? Surely the correct data was reported elsewhere? What was hidden exactly?

</comment><comment><USER33> Data tampering of this sort should be highly illegal. Like, years in prison, illegal.

</comment><comment><USER34> When I opened the article I got a gdrp cookie popup from Sinclair, who apparently owns CBS12.

I'm not American and all I know about the US media landscape is what I get from HN, but isn't Sinclair this local broadcaster that's notorious for spreading absolute bollocks all the time?

Does this site have anything to do with the real CBS?

More specifically, is any of this true?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no reason to distrust the local CBS affiliate, but in any case, it's a summary of a story reported by this news outlet: [https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/18/censorshi...](https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/18/censorship- covid-19-data-researcher-removed-florida-moves-re-open-state/5212398002/)

Note that floridatoday.com is a Gannett/GateHouse paper, and the reason why I didn't submit it is because I had thought that network is inaccesible to EU users.

<comment><USER11> Actually the Florida Today website opens with this banner: "Welcome to USA TODAY NETWORK'S EUROPEAN UNION EXPERIENCE", and is entirely ad free.

I believe it is better in general to post the original source, in order to support local journalism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Thank you for the info

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> US is no different from China it seems.

<comment><USER36> There is _always_ a temptation for people in power to "massage the facts" (for various levels of "massage") to make themselves look good. One difference between the US and China is that we have the freedom to call it out and discuss it. _Hopefully_ a second difference is that we'll have the political will to fire the people who asked to do the "massaging" \-- whether that will happen or not remains to be seen.

<comment><USER21> What difference does "the freedom to discuss it" make if it has no effect on policy?

<comment><USER37> Public discussions inherently have an effect on policy. That's why China censors so extensively. The reason they can apply strict lockdowns to cities with double-digit case counts is that their citizens can't have discussions about "hey this seems an overreaction".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The comments here on HN are borderline irresponsible.

All we know is that someone was removed for what they perceived be 'censoring some data' \- and we really have almost no context or material facts.

It continues to amaze me how people jump to conclusions and can't fathom how power, information, and communications work within any organization and that it's always complicated.

Having responsibility is almost 100% 'making sausage' and there is literally no situation in which the public will have access to 100% of the information, and when they do, it will be communicated in a specific way, hopefully for the public good.

For example, someone could feel that it's 'really important' to publish the latest finding on Hyrcoxychloroquine, or Remdesevir or whatever, when from a public communications perspective, it may not be helpful at all to be a focus on this information. Some might call this censorship, some might call it suppression, others might call it responsible.

How about hospital vacancy rates? Because all over North America, the vast majority of Hospitals are sitting idle, and medical staff are being laid off. Funny we don't see that on CNN. Obviously, from a public health policy, maybe this wouldn't be such a good set of data to focus on because people might get the impression that there is materially no pandemic, unable to grasp that in fact, the low rates of hospitalization are due to social distancing measures.

My gosh man this is everyday life in so many fields.

If some Florida politician was trying to literally get numbers manipulated, hopefully, this will be dealt with in the criminal justice system, but this may not be the case.

COVID is a sausage-making communications nightmare for everyone involved, there are massive legal issues, massive economic consequences, existential life and death concerns, literally geopolitical realignment happening in real- time.

Let's try to get more information.

Edit - a relevant example from Miami Herald: [1] "But since the state's first confirmed coronavirus case, officials have kept some basic information confidential. Most notable: DeSantis has chosen not to reveal the names of nursing homes experiencing outbreaks — cases that, according to Florida Department of Health data, have resulted in at least 126 deaths."

This is exactly the same in Quebec - they don't want to release the individual names of the homes (they are of course known to the occupants and relatives) because it's not meaningful information for the public to have. They've made a reasonable case for not doxxing the homes with problems.

So this is a pretty good example of where public information is managed for the public good. It happens everywhere.

What troubles me specifically about the whistleblower complaint is that there were no specifics at all - no actual articulation of malfeasance. 'Censorship' is a pretty vague term.

[1] [https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24205069...](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242050696.html)

<comment><USER24> > Let's try to get more information.

The irony of this part.

We need to hold leaders accountable, and we need to make good decisions. They are actively undermining that ability by censoring data and trying to cover their asses.

The rest of your comment trots out a truckload of red herrings about information we might not want to look at right now, or some disgruntled or misguided person not following proper channels and rushing to get out crap information about drugs or something. These things could not be less related to what we are talking about here. FFS they _fired_ the person whose _official job_ it was to make information available to the public and she reports it was because they wanted to censor it. I mean, does that not strike you as something she should absolutely blow the whistle on?

<comment><USER38> "FFS they fired the person whose official job it was to make information available to the public and she reports it was because they wanted to censor it. "

I think you are misreading my point and definitely misunderstanding the nature of the person's job.

We don't know what happened and 'censored' can mean a lot of things.

My quotes are not 'red herrings' \- they are examples of what is happening right now.

The Miami Herald is upset that Flordia would not publish the names of retirement homes?

What if this is literally the issue in question? What if this 'whistleblower' wanted to publish said names, but the Gov. didn't want her to? Is this worthy of whistle-blowing? I don't think so.

What if she wanted to make a graph where the landing page highlighted 'total new cases' (which looks bad because it's always rising) but the state wants 'daily new cases' (which looks better because it's ostensibly flat. Is that censorship?

And by the way - disgruntled people are fired all the time.

What we need is more information, and it's odd that the state employee did not actually give more specifics, it would validate the cause a little better.

Finally - it's not her job to decide what goes out and whatnot. Definitely not, that's a fairly high-level decision. Her job is to communicate and coordinate it effectively. But again, using my example the decision as to 'do we name the long term care homes or not?' is definitely above her pay grade. That's a communications job it will touch the highest levels.

So again - we need more information in order to determine the severity of what happened here. Maybe there is fraud rising to criminality, in which case I hope someone goes to jail, but it may not be that.

<comment><USER24> On the one hand you say we need more information, but the bulk of your comment is pure speculation and distraction. You already made a conclusion about her claims and it's obvious from the giant cloud of doubt you are trying to create. That's an unhealthy skepticism at best and bad faith incredulism at worst. Both are chilling effects for holding leaders accountable. I also think you don't understand what a red herring [1] is. Stop distracting with irrelevant anecdotes.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is pattern from this current crop of hyper-partisan political leadership

Whether it's stuff like this, crapping on journalists for asking legit questions, concealing or even destroying climate data, etc these folks should not be trusted with anything of consequence under any circumstances.

The fish rots from the head— even presuming this was the handiwork of some political appointee/apparatchik/barnacle who wanted to make sure there is no "bad news", they got their cue from higher up the food chain.

You'd figure a genuine crisis like this might shake these folks out of their stupor but no luck yet.

Many folks are stressed af about the economy & there needs to be be a cost/benefit way to measure the risks, etc but this is no good.

This is the kind of shady/moronic behavior you'd expect in a political ecosystem like China, Russia, Turkey, etc

<comment> throwaway-2020 I used to look up to America. It was the country I wished my country was more like. I often joked I wished the U.S. would buy our country so we could live in the 51st state. Sure no country doesn't have problems but there was an aura around America, at least in my eyes.

In the last few years I have been living in shock. I can't believe what is happening at the top levels of power. I oscillate between disbelief and anger. I spend most days with a sick feeling in my stomach. I constantly ask myself "How is this happening? When will someone stop the madness?", but it seems there is a story like this almost everyday.

I am close to losing hope.

<comment><USER40> This is not new, but it is getting so bad that people around the world are finally starting to realize that much of the image of the US is based on the fiction it sells. Rich country, (still) yes, but freedom and democracy have taken a turn to the worse in the last decades.

<comment><USER41> You mean since Eisenhower. Nothing much changed since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Let's be more specific. It's republicans.

<comment><USER43> It really is startling how reviled this sort of comment tends to be, despite the overarching trend of Republican leadership to systemically misrepresent and falsify data to support their views.

The next time Democrats pull these shenanigans, name and shame them. Both- sides-ism only obscures the bad actors that should be directly pressured to do better.

<comment><USER44> Deleting due to HN hivemind.

<comment><USER45> That's just, like, your opinion, man.

Here's what several news organizations have to say about Ron DeSantis (R-FL):

"Stop hiding true COVID-19 stats, Gov. DeSantis. Our lives are still at risk" — [https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article242557...](https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article242557271.html)

"Florida avoided COVID-19 catastrophe by ignoring DeSantis, Trump" — [https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-op-com- sc...](https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-op-com-schultz- governor-ron-desantis-public-trust-20200512-llb6fmxjwvg6pm3alyhghl7wiu- story.html)

"[Florida] blocked medical examiners from making public their own fatality counts and released a list of those deaths last week only after redacting key information" — [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/does-florida-gov- ro...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/does-florida-gov-ron-desantis- know-what-hes-doing-were-about-to-find- out/2020/05/08/8bf6537c-9135-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html)

 _Edit: the Cuomo section is an edit made after I posted this, as is the [0] addendum_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As an EU citizen, the US response to COVID-19 really is laughable. It's just that a lot of people die due to this ideological "but muh freedom" mentality.

<comment><USER47> As an EU citizen, I am still waiting for the EU response to COVID-19.

<comment><USER20> There won't be any, because EU is by design and vote not meant to have any response. We're not United Federation of Europe; the EU explicitly doesn't dictate medical policy across member states.

<comment><USER47> I'm closing 3 popups on every website I visit due to those not-policies not- dictated by not-EU.

Now I realize that cookies and IP-addresses gathered by Facebook are truly important things, unlike this tiny "flu-like" virus, but still...

<comment><USER20> You're closing 3 popups on every website because the authors of those websites are huge assholes. There is no need for a consent popup on a website unless the website is doing something shady. Perhaps the greatest failure of GDPR is that this point needs to be explained ad nauseam.

Anyway, this is irrelevant. EU was explicitly not meant to rule on healthcare- related matters for its member nations, so it's not ruling. That's a fact of the matter. Perhaps after all of this, people will vote to include healthcare into the EU's purview - and only then we'll be able to criticize its response to the next crisis.

<comment><USER47> No, those website authors are NOT assholes. They are providing awesome services I appreciate and take advantage of every day, otherwise I wouldn't visit them.

I don't know what you think they are doing shady, but it never bothered me. Until some EU-asshole decided to protect me from myself, I guess.

When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?

<comment><USER20> > _They are providing awesome services I appreciate and take advantage of > every day, otherwise I wouldn 't visit them._

GDPR is there to ensure those awesome services aren't also taking advantage of you, by requiring them to disclose when they want to do so, and to ask you to explicitly agree to be taken advantage of. Clarity in business relationships is good, isn't it?

> _When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?_

Not necessarily, not when it's broken for profit and to the detriment of the parties that doesn't partake in that profit. Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned (after all, "everyone" in plantations/factories would be found breaking that law), and environmental protections should've never existed either ("what do you say I can no longer dump toxic waste into the river?").

<comment><USER47> > GDPR is there to ensure those awesome services aren't also taking advantage > of you

You still haven't explained how exactly I was taken advantage of. Because I never had anything to complain about. On the contrary, I was quite happy until EU started "helping" me.

> Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never > been banned

Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???

<comment><USER20> > _You still haven't explained how exactly I was taken advantage of._

Every possible kind of data you radiate during your visit to such a site is collected and passed on to third parties that aggregate it to build a detailed profile of you, based on the information from sites you visit, services you use, games you play, places you shop, etc. That profile is nowadays primarily used to target you with advertising and direct marketing efforts - or, in other words, to suck money out of you, a little bit at a time. You're losing money because of this data collection - that's the primary reason for that collection in the first place - but it happens slowly and naturally, so you don't notice.

And then there's a good chance that such profile of you will eventually find its way to your insurance provider, healthcare provider, or that your government decides to take a step towards totalitarianism, and then they'll have everyone's digital twins available for the secret police for free. I agree that the last one is hypothetical, but not _that_ hypothetical, all things considering.

> _Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child > labor and toxic waste???_

No, I'm just showing the logical consequences of your "When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?" through examples that are a little bit more clear-cut.

Also, it's not "logging visitor IP" that causes the popup, it's "logging visitor IP, associating it with a bunch of UUIDs, and sending those UUIDs, along with whatever information the visitor's browser could gather _and_ the server could give, to a bunch of third parties who also receive similar packets of information from other sites you visit". Also2, it's not "everybody", it's just businessmen. Normal people don't go around, record data about others without their knowledge or consent, and sell it to data brokers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> So the government is lying. Thought only communist dictatorships did this.

<comment><USER49> The difference is that people living under dictatorship don't believe anything their government says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not to get in the way of a good mob with pitchforks, but so far this is just one persons claim. There's no other evidence.

We don't believe Joe Biden's accuser without more evidence, why do we believe this lady automatically?

</comment><comment><USER50> Imagine how different the comments would be if this article were about China...

<comment><USER51> I'm having trouble imagining the difference. I think people would still be claiming government corruption and hoping for accountability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's all fake data, anyway.

They're counting cancer patients that were given 30 days to live as COVID if they were positive when they died.</comment>


Visa drops $18 billion IPO, the largest ever in US history.  - <AUTHOR> http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=ACBJ&date=20080319&id=8365719

<comment><USER2> <PEDANTIC> Important news and appropriate for HN, but the use of the word "drops" in the title is a poor word choice as it suggests that the IPO did NOT occur. If you're talking about the 'release' of a new hip-hip album, the word 'drops' might be appropriate...but it has the opposite meaning if you're talking about IPOs and lawsuits ;-) </PEDANTIC>

Visa is a fascinating company. There was a really good article about it in Fast Company several years ago.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing out the rap exception to the word drop. No sarcasm.

I'm working on a new site that, in part, will be devoted to deciphering rap lyrics. Should be pretty dope.

<comment><USER4> I'll make sure to drop by sometime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How hard was it for them to get "V"?

In other news, as late as yesterday, Visa was a private company. Crazy.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it only took them 50 years (during almost all of which they were the market leader) to IPO. Imagine that in the tech world. That'd be like Google not going public until 2050.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations to the JPMorgan deal team for putting together a great deal in really tough financial situations. I too had no idea that it was a private company.

To anyone wondering why their symbol isn't VISA: only NASDAQ companies have four-letter symbols. NYSE-listed companies have three letters or fewer.

</comment><comment><USER7> VISA: it's everywhere you want to be, now including wall street.</comment>