system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: probability and statistics should be part of the high school core curriculum.

**Edit - we're done here:** It's been demonstrated convincingly that statistical literacy is generally unrelated to the underlying problem, and that it would be much more effective to teach "some very basic philosophy, rhetorical critique, and the underlying psychology of believe".

**Edit - major change:** A better approach would be "specific tasks that encourage further analysis, such as debates, research and other such projects. If you teach that desire for further inquiry and a healthy sense of skepticism, then people don't need specific prior education in stats at all."

I think basic statistical literacy is important to basic functioning in a world that has tons of data flying around on various important topics.  When a lot of important arguments hinge on statistics, it's difficult to critically evaluate the points made without understanding the math.

One example is that people are prone to comparing the risk or benefit of [action] to nothing, not considering the risk or benefit of [inaction].  This problem runs deeper than being acquainted with the math, but I think having some training in thinking that way would encourage thinking it through properly.  For a more immediate association, it's also pretty common for people to compare proportions of [thing] by population without considering the size of the respective populations.  Both of these have prominent current examples, but I want to avoid the distraction of bringing up specific political controversies here.

Not a particularly in-depth argument, but I think it's fairly obvious that a lot of people aren't equipped to reason about important statistics, and I don't see a major downside to trying to change that.  That said, I haven't given it a ton of thought, so I'm open to the possibility that I overlooked something obvious (e.g. evidence that it wouldn't work).

To address "what class would this replace?", I think it would work fine in place of an existing math class.
gpt
We have it as part of high school here in France, it doesn't make the situation really better. 

Proper explanation of the scientiffic method is a start, sure. But a bigger problem is the public trust in institutions. After a while of being bombarded with conveniently presented statistics (when ot outright lying) you start to not care anymore and assume that whatever data was already manipulated to fit a speciffic narrative. 

It's already a lot of work to even recognize the bias involved, and it require way more than basic knowledge in statistics.