Yesterday I listened to a panel discussion on this subject, part of the most excellent New Yorker Festival.

(Interestingly, this was scheduled at the same time on Mad Men with Matthew Weiner and Lee Clow. So you had to choose between new math and old advertising. I wavered for a moment and then plunged forward into the future.)

Bill McGrath, the wry New Yorker staff writer moderated a panel of mathematical pop stars in a sold out show.

Nancy Flournoy is the chair of the statistics department at the University of Missouri at Columbia. She uses statistics in the study of biology and medicine.

Bill James is one of the foremost baseball statisticians and advisor to the Red Sox, who has transformed the game.

Nate Silver is another baseball statistician who has turned into a political analyst. His blog FiveThirtyEight.com correctly predicted the outcome of the last election in forty nine states.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is most famous for his book “Gang Leader for a Day”, based on his first hand research. (He’s the guy in Freakonomics that proves that most drug dealers only make $3.50 an hour, despite their image.)

Even a couple of years ago it would have been unlikely that The New Yorker would have taken such an interest in this subject, or even spotted the commonality among these four speakers. Now it feels like a natural part of the cultural agenda.

The conversation rambled, but if there was a central theme it was around the “numbers that story tell”. “Numbers are words”, in Bill James’ memorable phrase.

These experts agreed that there were drawbacks to “easy data” and that we had “gone from being starved for data to being swamped”. Nate Silver said that he started his blog because “polls are crap”. The supply of information has made the distinction between fact and “what people think they know” more difficult than ever.

In fact the data explosion makes probability easier to determine, but certainty as elusive as ever. Nancy Flournoy commented that “being a statistician means never having to say that you’re certain”.

Sometimes data is dangerous. Banks were much discussed. There was what Silver called a “species diversity problem” when all banks used the same data and acted in the same ways:  all get the same disease and all die at the same time. Flournoy likened this groupthink to “harmonic swings” in which bridges set swinging by winds eventually collapse.

Naturally, the state of math education came up, but with an interesting twist. “Too much calculus and not enough statistics”, was Venkatesh’s judgment. The misunderstanding of the basic laws of probability leaves people very vulnerable to being misled. This is why most people can’t grasp the immediacy of the global warming problem, pointing out that we seem to be having an unseasonably cold Fall, as contradictory evidence. Probability should be taught until it is intuitive.

Well, this was certainly a start.