Just to prove that stupidity innumeracy knows no national borders, we have a classic example from the UK, courtesy Good Math, Bad Math. The context: a lottery game which involved identifying which numbers (temperatures) were less than some target. And some of the numbers were negative…
On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.
It’s interesting to relate this (common) kind of innumeracy with the “naive physics” that Pinker describes in his books. Perhaps the world isn’t ready for negative numbers; anyone for °Kelvin?