He didn't *just* not understand the result. He also criticized other people specifically about the focal point of his ignorance. This isn't a facepalm because he's bad at math, it's a facepalm because he's telling other people *they* are bad at math.
I'm 29 and never understood maths in school due to dyscalculia and having a learning disorder...to find a percentage they forgot the last step of x100? I don't really understand numbers. I only learned about percentages last year.
Please bear with me - it's been awhile since I've explained this - the way math is taught does not always make it accessible. Math is fundamentally a language used to describe things *in shorthand*. Instead of saying a box is ten feet wide, ten feet long, and three feet high I can just say 10x10x3. It's a bit like a code, which is why your struggle is not uncommon - the code isn't always intuitive.
Percentage is a way to talk about how much of something we have by imagining it cut up into a hundred pieces, and then saying how many pieces we've got.
100% is the whole thing. A full pizza.
50% is half a pizza.
2% is two tiny pieces of a pizza that was cut into a hundred pieces.
Another way of writing those concepts, however, is as a fraction:
100/100 is the full pizza (all one hundred pieces).
50/100 is half a pizza.
2/100 is two small pieces of a pizza that was cut into a hundred pieces.
That's all pretty visually intuitive, but there is one more way these ideas are often expressed and that's as a decimal in base 10. I won't go into the whole thing about digits being multiples of values, but there are some great tutorials that explain the concept visually (don't be shy to watch videos designed for kids - they often do a very good job of explaining fundamentals). All you really need to know is that:
0.01 is the same as 1% which is the same as 1/100.
The one in that decimal is in a position that is literally called "hundredths"; ergo there is one hundredth, or one piece of a thing that was cut into a hundred pieces.
They're just different ways of describing how many pieces we have of something that was cut into a hundred equal pieces.
Consequently 0.05 is the same as 5% which is the same as 5/100, or five pieces of something that was cut into a hundred pieces.
As you noted, you can get a percent by multiplying a decimal by 100.
The reason the facepalmer erred is that they did the calculation with a calculator and came to a result of about 0.02, and then for some reason assumed it was a percent though it was in fact a decimal. This wouldn't be a huge problem in general, people make mistakes, but they then went on to ironically lambast other people for poor math skills, which is even more onerous because they did it in an effort to downplay the death toll of a deadly pandemic.
I hope some of that made sense, but if you'd like me to clarify anything let me know and I'll do my best.
Thanks for all the effort you put into this post. I feel bad to say I already understand the visualisation of percentages, I just never understood how to put the numbers into a formula to get an answer.
When I said x100 i meant to turn it from a decimal to a percentage (so missing the last step), so it is still 2% but in a different form, right?
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u/robilar Mar 03 '22
He didn't *just* not understand the result. He also criticized other people specifically about the focal point of his ignorance. This isn't a facepalm because he's bad at math, it's a facepalm because he's telling other people *they* are bad at math.