I never learned statistics until my second year in university, it was really mind opening, especially with showing me just how much poorly done statistics with tiny sample sizes or misrepresented data are quoted and used as facts.

I actually found statistics pretty fun and eventually we learned to use R for it. Though I ended up missing 1 lecture and it almost screwed me over for the rest of the class. I found a Kahn academy video though that covered it and was able to catch up. There really is a ton of information to learn. It would have been nice to have at least touched on it a little bit in highschool beyond learning about means and the tiniest bit about standard deviations.

This guy is one of my favorite TED speakers, and he makes a strong argument for exactly this: https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_chan....

Thanks for sharing! (writes the girl who barely passed pre-calc)

> It seems like an education fail to me.

I know a lot of people have trouble thinking clearly and correctly about probability and statistical inference.

But do we know if, practically speaking, that can be addressed by a modified educational curriculum?

Or are these concepts that would take an extraordinary amount of effort for many persons to understand well?

They're nuanced concepts that are easily misunderstood, but in a typical US public school, statistical significance (or anything beyond basic descriptive statistics) is not typically part of the curriculum[1]. It's a hard problem to effectively educate out of existence but right now we're not even really trying.

[1] source: I never saw it as a student, and I've consulted with math teachers (well, administrators, about math) in multiple states, and I've never had it come up there either.