Whoops! Another Tiny Mistake. But Who’s Counting?

In writing recently about innumeracy--the lack of knowledge of numbers--I called myself an innumerate. An editor pointed out that innumerate as a noun is not in the dictionary, which I soon verified.

My handy Webster’s New World, The Times’ house dictionary, does list innumerate as an adjective, meaning “lacking the knowledge needed to deal with scientific, especially mathematical, concepts.”

It also lists the noun innumeracy. Surely it follows that if a person can be innumerate, then that person is an innumerate, as a person who is illiterate is an illiterate.

I have no doubt that the word will soon be recognized in dictionaries, and that I may be cited as among the first to use it.

Meanwhile, I not only admitted that I was an innumerate, but also quickly proved it.

In misquoting a Newsweek article on numbers by John Allen Paulos, I wrote that only 39 Americans were killed abroad by terrorists in 1985, a bad year, or only one in 7,000.

The first to point out that egregious error was my friend Morry Pynoos, who called to suggest that I probably meant one in 7 million, based on the population of the United States.

I received a letter from Rabbi Alfred Wolf, my spiritual adviser, who said he had tried to phone me all morning but got a busy signal. “This only strengthened my conviction that you sorely needed the services of your spiritual adviser. I can just see a million of your readers trying to get in touch with you by phone or letter to gloat over what they think was one of the two mistakes (a year) you permit yourself.

“I know better. You wanted to accomplish two purposes: 1) You wanted to test your readers to see if they paid attention. 2) You wanted to illustrate graphically that you are not adept at numbers.”

He pointed out that it was not, in any case, a serious mistake. He argued that my figure 7,000 should have been 7 million--but that I was off by “just three zeros--nothing!”

Rabbi Wolf held that the figure would have been based on the total U.S. population, as Pynoos had. Reader George H. Matter made the same point, calculating that, based on a population of 240 million, the ratio would more likely be one in 7 million.

Estimating the U.S. population at 230 million in 1985, H. D. Amacker of Santa Monica calculated the odds at one in 5,897,436.

Actually, Paulos based his calculation not on the population but on the 28 million Americans who went abroad that year (which I should have said), and the chance of being killed was one in 700,000, not 7,000.

In other words, Pynoos, Wolf and Matter were wrong by 6,300,000 while I was only wrong by 693,000. Obviously, among those who did not go abroad that year, the chance of being killed by terrorists was zero.

While I have a second chance, I might as well go deeper into the matter of my innumeracy. In his article Paulos tells a joke that he considers “marginally relevant,” his point being that many adults “have no idea of easily imagined numbers.”

Paulos’ joke is about a married couple in their 90s who contact a divorce lawyer. He urges them to stay together, asking, “Why get divorced now after 70 years of marriage?” Finally, the wife responds. “We wanted to wait until the children were dead.”

Paulos observes that “a feeling for which magnitudes are appropriate for various contexts is essential to getting the joke.”

I didn’t get it.

Evidently it has something to do with the odds against the couple outliving their offspring, but, if so, I still don’t think it’s funny.

Maybe mathematicians have a different sense of humor.

Paulos thinks newspapers ought to print more about numbers and probabilities. Innumeracy, he says, leads to a belief in pseudoscience. He explains why psychics keep predicting events that never come true, evidently hoping that one will. “That some unlikely event will come to pass is likely; that a particular one will is not.”

That is why I’ve been so successful in counterpredicting the predictions of seers in supermarket newspapers. I have never been wrong yet.

I was wrong, though, when I predicted, last August, that we would not go to war in the Persian Gulf, and that if we did, we would regret it. That was not a counterprediction. That was a product of my own wisdom and foresight.

So far, though, only one reader has written to remind me of that failure. Of course that’s what the professional seers count on--that their misses will be overlooked, and they will be adulated for their rare strikes.

The trouble is, no one remembers my correct predictions, either.