Most Americans Say 'arabic Numerals' Should Not Be Taught in School (2019)

There is NO concept of zero with Roman numerals.

So that nixes an intelligence test like the Jim Crow South.

The ugly truth is that too much democracy always leads to populist dictators. And social media makes manufacturing consent way too easy.

One way around political parties, career corrupt politicians, and charismatic mass murderers is sortition. Directly elect a common legislative body who then set a minimal standard of qualifications for a very large pool of potentual upper echelon public administrators. From these, every X years, say 2 to 4, some people are chosen by lottery to run things. Divide up power a great deal more and never let the rich be in-charge of everything. It's purposefully not anarchistically "democratic" to avoid entire categories of problems that waste energy, treasure, lives, and effort on unmoored, fantastical political factionism will never solve, nor will any temporarily apparently balanced countervailing political status quo. It is utopian and naive to give everyone direct or semi-direct control because people will vote for what is cruel or popular rather than fairest or long-term essential. I'd rather have some semi-disinterested random person like a recently retired airline pilot or an accountant without bought alliances dig into big decisions with data, stakeholder input, and structured decision support.

how would binary representation work with roman numerals ?

Perhaps at least one person was an Indian-American who is annoyed that the numeral system isn't commonly known as Hindu or at least Hindu-Arabic numerals, for nationalist reasons. I've met Indians who have expressed this opinion before.

> What if they asked about "Italian numerals", "Turkish numerals" or "Turtle Numerals"?

None of those are real things. "Arabic numerals" are a fundamental concept that, at one point, were quite clearly taught in schools.

> It is possible that people just saying "No" because they don't know what they are, so assume that they aren't important.

So your argument is that these people aren't bigoted, they're just incredibly stupid?

My guess would be the only context where they ever heard or thought about a city in the middle east is in context of a US war. If you think the US is only fighting for good and justified reason any city you hear something about is one that is likely full of whatever enemies the US has at that moment. Why else would anybody talk about the middle east? So of course its ok to bomb it if somebody is considering it and the military would do it then the person answering is ok with it.

They weren't hiding it, it was literally in the subheading:

> research designed to 'tease out prejudice among those who didn't understand the question'

The purported aim of the research:

> designed to explore the bias and prejudice of poll respondents.

And the research was from:

> Civic Science, an American market research company

The research worked as intended.

Do you take everything so literally?