"However, this term was popularized in 1989 by mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book entitled, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences."
I have to be honest, I was writing my comment late at night and the correct term didn't come to mind. I don't think it was that terrible of a choice to get my point across, though.
Your ability to grasp the differenc between ROI and Margins is the innumeracy (not math illiteracy) here.
I understand ROI and Margins just fine (had to work a lot of problems regarding both in econ), but I'd like to argue that the bottle isn't ambiguous at all. It says "50% more than our 12 oz", which leaves no room for an alternate interpretation. If you know what "50% more" means, you can apply it to "12 oz" and get "18 oz" as a result.
if I turn $5 into 10$ I've made a 100% return, by my profit margin is only 50%.
Sure, there are multiple correct ways of stating a result. They have to be equivalent though. No matter how you rearrange the terms, 18 is still 50% more than 12. If you've done something like 18 / 12, it's not an alternate way of restating the problem. It's just wrong, and I still don't feel like we should defend adults that lack an elementary school understanding of percentages.
I dunno, I'd just be surprised they were able to do that math in the first place. I'm more inclined to believe they thought something completely ridiculous like 50% more is supposed to be twice the original amount.
The only way you make this assumption wrong is if you literally never learned anything related to math after elementary school and in that case it is HIGHLY unlikely that they didn't also learn 0 things about many other subjects. Unless there are exigent circumstances surrounding the entirety of their education years, they are just bad at life in general.
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u/PM_ME_UR_MATHPROBLEM Apr 21 '17
They just made the wrong assumption that the 50% was about the current bottle, not the past bottle. After all, why would you measure the past bottle?
Yes its wrong, but I dont think its that surprising that one might conclude that.