Sad numbers:
It takes even less familiarity with statistics to be stunned by the public policy implications in a simple question about abortion figures. Asked in an experiment to guess how many abortions occur in the US for every million live births, students gave a wide range of answers. At the middle of the range was an estimate of 5,000. That figure is so far from the correct answer - 335,000 - that, in the words of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is "not even wrong." Blastland and Dilnot report that being asked to guess before learning the correct answer leads to a greater sense of surprise, and students in the experiment became much more supportive of abortion restrictions. "Accurate data does matter to people," the authors rule.
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