[cagenut]

I call it "functional innumeracy". Our society is stuck at a local-maxima for communicating via headlines and short-conversations where we can only really compress and encode signed-keywords to each other. Meaning like, musk+ or musk-, bitcoin+ or bitcoin-.

If we want to take things to the next level of numerical understanding, where we "graph" all sorts of rates, distributions, curves, crossover and inflection points, etc, then what do we do? Fuck around in a spreadsheet for an hour and screen shot that and upload it to imgur and put the link in here? Comb through google images for something close enough and maybe photoshop some arrows on it?

We need a better communication toolkit than a few hundred bytes of ascii to make it possible for people to introduce a heightened degree of numeracy in everyday conversations and decision making. Image macros and emojis and infographics are pigin attempts to go down this road, but we're not there yet (that i've seen, links if you got 'em).

Imagine you're a journalist right now, you're logged into wordpress, you need to explain the insane disaster of today's GDP report, and you have a deadline of finishing your post before lunch. What do you do?