- Sep 12, 2008
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An interesting chart from the folks at Pew research
And an interesting and very short article from Scientific American on the danger of misleading poling.
It is Noteworthy that the evangelicals scored better than mainline, and the Mormons did better yet. And if you assume, as I do, that some of those questions might have been included just to make sure these two groups got them wrong, then their numbers might have jumped off the chart for the rest of the test.
And while Hispanic catholic might have the bottom of the chart, that might not be an artifact of religion, but an artifact of immigrants historically suffer, lack of higher education.
Notice Black protestant has the same issue, education for blacks in this country is an embarrassment, with the lousy schools they are stuck with.
And buried in the back of the Pew report is the reality that if you match education attainment with the answers, the religious difference in knowledge shrinks dramatically.
Also not included in the numbers are Buddhist and Shinto. Both religions emphasizing education, as does Judaism. If they had included that, it might have been even more interesting.
So, the poll had two groups of atheist, separated I don't know how. And the large, more accurate sample of that group was the worst scoring among the white population.
Anyway,numbers don't lie. People often do.
And an interesting and very short article from Scientific American on the danger of misleading poling.
Few seemed to realize that the polls were far from immaculate. In fact, the episode was a good example of what I call disestimation: the act of taking fuzzy numbers way too seriously.
At first, it might seem like a cut-and-dried story: out of 32 quiz questions, atheists and agnostics, on average, got 20.9 correct, higher than any other group and higher than the overall average of 16.0 questions right. But because Pew managed to reach very few atheists and agnostics—only 212 people out of the 3,412 included in the survey—the 20.9 number masks a tremendous amount of imprecision. Small samples don’t give reliable numbers, and if you pre sent the poll results using a standard graphical technique to represent uncertainty (below), you can see that the distinction between atheists/agnostics and Jews and Mormons evaporates.
The story gets even fuzzier because Pew left out one category altogether: those who believe “nothing in particular,” many of whom had specifically said they didn’t believe in God. Interestingly, this group scored worse than the typical American on the religion quiz. Had they been lumped together with atheists and agnostics, the group would have fared a little worse, on average, than evangelical Protestants.
It is Noteworthy that the evangelicals scored better than mainline, and the Mormons did better yet. And if you assume, as I do, that some of those questions might have been included just to make sure these two groups got them wrong, then their numbers might have jumped off the chart for the rest of the test.
And while Hispanic catholic might have the bottom of the chart, that might not be an artifact of religion, but an artifact of immigrants historically suffer, lack of higher education.
Notice Black protestant has the same issue, education for blacks in this country is an embarrassment, with the lousy schools they are stuck with.
And buried in the back of the Pew report is the reality that if you match education attainment with the answers, the religious difference in knowledge shrinks dramatically.
Also not included in the numbers are Buddhist and Shinto. Both religions emphasizing education, as does Judaism. If they had included that, it might have been even more interesting.
So, the poll had two groups of atheist, separated I don't know how. And the large, more accurate sample of that group was the worst scoring among the white population.
Anyway,numbers don't lie. People often do.
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