Looks like Coke employs some top-flight MBA grads in its marketing department.
I remember reading somewhere that after McDonald's introduced its quarter pounder, a competitor tried to one-up the industry leader by marketing a new one-third pound burger. (Please no joke about actually trying to 1/12-up the industry leader.) The third-pound burger never caught on and was soon discontinued. In trying to figure out what went wrong, McD's rival supposedly discovered that lots of Americans don't comprehend that 1/3 > 1/4. (I guess because 4 is bigger than 3 and they don't know what it means when the number is on the bottom like that? Or maybe they don't know that "quarter" means "1/4"?) Anyway, I thought the story must be an invention, but maybe Coca-Cola knows it isn't and that therefore it makes sense to mention on the packaging that
15 > 12
and not just by 1 or 2.
Perhaps pervasive innumeracy has something to do with our inability to beat back Covid. A self-styled internet contrarian (and regular Fox News contributor) recently cited the following data,
from the state of Oklahoma, as proof that the Covid vaccines are essentially worthless. He highlights the fact that, over the past 30 days, "almost half" (actually, 114 out of 263, which is 43 percent) of those 65 and up admitted to hospital for Covid had been fully vaccinated. Sounds like a poor vaccine, right? But a crucial piece of information is left out: the percentage of people who have been vaccinated. Let's say that figure is 80 percent—I think the percentage of seniors who have been vaccinated, nationally, is higher than that, but Oklahoma has its full allotment of swaggering fools and 80 percent is convenient for calculation. Out of 1000 Oklahoma seniors, then, 800 will have been vaccinated and 200 will be unvaccinated. If 40 end up hospitalized with Covid, 17 will have been fully vaccinated and 23 will be unvaccinated. You can see that, when the issue at hand is vaccine efficacy, it's extremely misleading to say that "almost half" of hospitalizations for seniors are for vaccinated seniors. Here are the ratios that matter: out of 800 who were vaccinated, 17 end up in hospital, and, of 200 who were not vaccinated, 23 end up in hospital. That's 2.1 percent versus 11.5 percent. The unvaccinated are more than 5 times more likely to be hospitalized.
And this almost certainly understates vaccine efficacy, since those who choose to be vaccinated likely self-select for being, on the whole, in more tenuous health, and therefore more cautious, than those who spurn the vaccine. Thus a breakthrough infection, when it occurs, is more likely to require hospitalization.
The allure of anti-vax arguments often relies on innumeracy, of which there seems to be plenty. I wonder whether the purveyors of these arguments know how bad they are. Maybe in their innocence it just doesn't occur to them that their argument sinks when you take account of all that needs to be considered. The alternative, it seems to me, is that they are actively seeking to increase the amount of misery and suffering in the world.
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