A perfect “strawman argument”. You came up with the “idiot” conclusion, assigned it to me, and then became indignant with me about it. What I did say is that someone who does NOT understand the term, “Arabic numerals”, should ask for clarification before attempting to answer the question. The fact is that, as soon as they heard the work “Arabic”, their minds were made up with no clarification needed or desired.
Heh. Now I remember the first one . . . I don’t think we did the one with the ball, though maybe I just don’t remember.
Well, I think that’s an interesting question for a different thread; to what degree an adult “should” be responsible as an adult for educational trivia learned in grade school. I’d argue that, no, they “shouldn’t” be expected to know it now, because, well, there’s a lot of stuff to know in the world, and this is one wildly unimportant piece of Jeopardy trivia.
But there’s an argument being made in this thread that the poll linked to in the OP shows that most Americans are bigots/prejudiced because they do know that Arabic numerals are just “plain numbers” but that because they’re bigots they want those numbers out of the schools, or something.
If a respondent doesn’t know what an “Arabic numeral” is, I don’t see how you can reasonably assume that their “no” response on a “yes/no/other” poll about putting them into the curriculum is a clear indication that they are bigots, as opposed to being a clear indication that they assume that “Arabic numerals” are part of an optional foreign language curriculum.
A good “control question” would have been “Do you believe that Mayan numerals should be taught in math class?”. Mayan numbers are a real thing, and they do have real pedagogical value (if not necessarily direct practical value) in discussing place-value number systems with different bases. But of course, a person who knew what they are could reasonably disagree that they should be taught, on the merits. Thus, the question about Mayan numerals should have a greater proportion of “no” answers than the one about Arabic numerals.
That said, while there are multiple possible reasons why someone would answer “no” to the Arabic numerals question, and not all of them are due to bigotry, none of them are good. If you never learned or can’t remember what Arabic numerals are, then you should have either asked for clarification, or answered “I don’t know”. And even then, that probably indicates some problems in our educational system.
You can debate the racism aspect all day, but what this poll also shows is that people will answer polls without understanding the question. It doesn’t matter whether they are answering no for bigoted reasons or not, they’re answering a question they obviously don’t understand.
If some pollster asked the SD, “Do you believe President trump is correct in his response to the Wakanda-Bangalla situation?”, and 56% said “no”, what do you think that shows?
If people are unsure what “Arabic numerals” are, they should ask, not just spew forth with responses revealing their ignorance, or bigotry, as the case may be. If a similar poll shows 90% are in favor of banning the dangerous substance dihydrogen monoxide, it’s the same thing. Why can’t people ask for clarification? No one is forcing them to be stupid, or ignorant. Ask a question., Read a book!
HA! Cronos said basically the same thing whilst I was typing.
Dopers would find out about Wakanada-Bangalla before answering.
Ask whom? Any time in the last 15 years or so I’ve been polled it’s been pre-recorded questions played on a system that only gave you a limited time to answer before deciding you weren’t interested and hanging up. Even back in the day when it was a real person polling, asking a clarifying question would result in your answer being recorded as “Don’t know” or “Don’t care”, as the pollster was required to word the question exactly as written without embellishment.
It’s not a strawman. You said "anyone with a modicum of education should be able to understand [that Arabic numerals are “normal numbers”]. . . "
I admit to adding the word idiot, but your connotation is clearly that only those with no education whatsoever could conceivably both not know what Arabic numerals are, and also know that the obvious answer, that they are a foreign language number system, is incorrect so they better look it up in order to correct their assumption which they have no reason to assume is incorrect, in order to answer what is likely an automated phone survey that they’re doing on their lunch break.
Your idea that “as soon as they heard the work “Arabic”, their minds were made up with no clarification needed or desired,” is, like, your opinion. And is not borne out by anything in the poll, and is based purely on your desire to believe that 56-71% of Americans hate Arabs.
Again, I’m not taking a position one way or another on the prevalence of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment in America, only that this poll doesn’t show it. It shows that 71% of Americans don’t know what Arabic numerals are.
Anyone who knows what Arabic numerals are votes “Yes”. Anyone who doesn’t know, or thinks it’s something other than what it is votes “No” or “No opinion”.
There’s also a weird bit of the arguments here that seem to imply that in the idyllic, less Trumpian past more people would have answered “Yes”, not because more Americans knew what Arabic numerals were, but because their relative lack of Anti-Arab sentiment would have lead them to pull out a World Book Encyclopedia and look up “Arabic numerals”, even if they already thought they knew what they were.
Everybody in this thread talking about what people “should” know and what they “should” do when answering polls as far as taking time to research . . . I’m wondering what planet you’re on. Do you imagine there is there a question and answer period in polling? Do you believe a poll-taker has an option to pause and do research on a polling question and get back to the pollster later?
Seems very probable, but more to the point, every such person is spectacularly uninformed. I would worry about them having the right to vote. They might elect someone just like themselves.
Particularly in the case of this poll, which is setup as a gotcha. They’re not going to tell anyone what “Arabic numbers” are when the entire point of the poll is to show how many people don’t know what “Arabic numbers” are.
The poll results almost certainly include a fair amount of racism, but I suspect the main bias influencing the results is around education policy. There’s broad agreement that the American education system is broken, but pretty sharp disagreement on how to fix it. At the risk of being reductive, liberals tend to see the problems with education and think, “Traditional pedagogical models are failing, we need to try something innovative,” and conservatives then to the problem as, “We keep introducing all these new education approaches which make things worse, when what we really need is to get back to teaching the basics.” I suspect a significant portion of the Republicans polled who said “No” were reacting more from that bias, then from a specifically anti-Arab, or even a broader anti-multiculturalism, bias.
The idea that the people who voted “no” or “not sure” are particularly stupid for not knowing what “Arabic numbers” are is absurd. The fact that we got our numbering system from the Arabs is trivia. It’s something you learn in the fifth grade, and then almost certainly never use again. It really doesn’t say anything about a person’s intellect if they didn’t retain that - and this particular result is especially meaningless, as the poll was designed to deliberately obfuscate the question being asked by phrasing it as a policy debate. If you’d asked me, “What culture did we get our numbers from,” I’d probably have gotten it right. If you asked me the question from this poll, I can pretty easily see myself whiffing because I’m trying to consider the issue as a current debate, and not a historical footnote.
The only reasonable criticism to draw from this is that more people should say, “I don’t know” when they’re asked a question about a subject they don’t know, instead of answering based on assumptions they’re making based on how the question is asked. But that’s hard for me to get especially worked up over.
That, or the pollsters found a number of assholes who mess with polls on the Internet, possibly by voting multiple times.
Incomprehensible and inconceivable, I know. Utterly beyond the ken of mortal pollster. Possibly even beyond the barbie of same.
But the former isn’t much better than the latter, it just lacks the racist element. What if this number system that they obviously have never heard of had really important educational value because it gave kids unique insights into mathematics?
Basically the latter explanation reflects the attitude, “I don’t want my kids learnin’ no Mooslem number system”, while the former reflects the attitude “I don’t want my kids learnin’ no newfangled stuff that I don’t understand”. I’m convinced that many people vote the same way they answer polls, so one might laughingly dismiss this poll as silliness, but it’s a lot harder to dismiss where the country is today politically.
I greatly doubt that. Basically, who cares. And why would anyone pay for a poll about it.
I’m sure they were aware that most people don’t remember what Arabic numbers are. Which does not make them stupid, since being good at math without remembering that is not a hindrance to life. I doubt even Paulos would call someone who could do long division easily and not know this innumerate.
The proper answer would be “I don’t know.” But the pollsters knew that most people don’t want to admit that they don’t know something in public, and so would not take that as an answer. Or seeing Arabic meant that they thought they did know what it was.
I doubt many people are against teaching math in general, so without bias, and focusing on “numeral” you’d expect the don’t knows to split evenly each way - or even be in favor of teaching something math related. But they clearly saw Arabic more than they saw Numeral. And Arabic is bad, which is where the bias is shown.
Redo the poll with “American Numerals” and see what happens. Probably 80% yes.
Also, as far as people answering with an opinion despite not understanding what Arabic numbers are, I can’t even really fault that, since I would argue that those people likely believed that Arabic numbers were exactly what they sound like they are, and didn’t feel the need for clarification, or “no opinion”. Again, all this is just laughing at people who don’t remember that our numbers are called Arabic. If the question was, “should the Arabic language be part of the curriculum”, answering no to that doesn’t equal prejudice, any more than saying Hungarian shouldn’t be part of the high school curriculum. And of course some people are answering no due purely to bigotry, but there’s no way to get any meaningful distinction of that from this poll
I just got a robocall a day or two ago with a “one question poll”. The question was “Do you favor [some state issue]? Press 1 for, yes press 2 for no.” There was no “I don’t know” or “No opinion” option.
Well, then that’s a fault of the poll (not this one, but in general). If someone polled me and asked if mystilology should be taught in high school, asking the pollster what mystilology is doesn’t mean “don’t know/don’t care” reflects my feelings. Maybe I have strong opinions on the subject, but just know it by another term. They should start out, “are you familiar with mystilology?” before continuing. So in that sense, this “gotchya” poll is flawed as a poll.
Still, no one is forcing people to answer poll questions. Just say no.
So that’s 71% of the people at a minimum, according to this poll, who are spectacularly uninformed. Guess we should consider revoking the right to vote from these people based on this one bit of trivia knowledge, since their voting is so worrying. Awesome!
Let’s create some arbitrary tests full of facts that people “should” know in order to prove they’re smart enough to vote. That’ll keep the spectacularly uninformed from messing up representative Democracy. What’s better, let’s just fill the test with random and irrelevant cultural tidbits that the test designers have decided are the kind of random bits of info that the “right sort of people” are likely to know.
I mean really . . . folks are off the rails on this subject.
This is possibly true for some respondents, but again, the only way to state that as a “clear” or “likely” cause of the results is to bring your own suppositions, that most Americans (50-70%) are biased against Arabs, and those anti-Arab-inspired votes represent an overwhelming percentage of the responses.
You just can’t know that.
You say: “people think Arabic is bad, so voted no.”
Why not: “people feel that curriculums are already overwhelmed with unnecessary requirements, so voted against adding a subject that they had never heard of until they took this poll.”
Or: “people have been lead to believe in recent decades that a focus on STEM subject is the most vital part of public education, and so adding an arbitrary foreign language/culture component to already struggling schools seems like a bad idea.”
Did more people answer “no” to this question than did 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago?
What are the differences between the responses to this question and similarly phrased questions about other seemingly specialized subjects of questionable recognizability?
If you don’t have comparable data, you can’t really draw any defensible conclusions from this poll question.
Or, let me ask, if America was less biased against Arabs, but still had the same relative ignorance about what Arab numerals are, how do you think that would affect this question? What would the numbers look like, and on what data do you base those numbers?
I’d say just lacking the racist element makes it *much *better.
I’m not sure what it is about that part of my post that you “greatly doubt.”
I’m not sure where you’re getting that number. According to the breakdown the “no” answer came from 72% of Republicans, and just 34% of Democrats. Which seems about right. 
I’m disappointed that so many Democrats and Independents are unaware of basic terminology. Though I suppose the poll does track with the notion that those who are better educated lean liberal.
Also it occurs to me that “no opinion” might include responses on the order of “take your stupid trick question and shove it up your butt”, which gives us margin to cast all three groups in a better light (and also would suggest that more Democrats ‘got it’).
The total number of respondents who voted no or no opinion. All of whom must not understand what Arabic numerals are, and therefore, in your own opinion are dangerous at the polls.