Suppose I said, "It's important to protect endangered species. There are 130 billion mammals on Earth."

It's plain English, but I picked the wrong measure to support my claim.

Your analogy is backwards. It’s more like the author said “This is good for all mammals” and you are the one that inserted “but there exists a smaller subset of mammals”, which is entirely orthogonal to the point.

The author's thesis is that Arabic text is important because two billion people recognize its alphabet. This fact is irrelevant because it's a proper superset of the group that matters: people who can read Arabic.

Let me try a different analogy. "It's important for caterers in the US to provide a gluten-free meal choice. After all, the population is 332 million!" Without knowing the incidence of gluten sensitivity, it's a borderline-misleading statistic.

I am glad that we agree that this article that referred to people with varying degrees of knowledge of Arabic script is not, in fact, about people that are fluent.

I also agree that the existence of a subset that wasn’t referred to at all in the article is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand!

The article strongly implies that the "some degree" group is the group that matters. But it's not. The group that matters is somewhere in between "some degree" and "fluent".

And the parent comment was not talking about fluent people when writing "can read".

Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally?

Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter?

This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”?

If being rigid about these numbers is so important, how many people that don’t matter today might matter next year? How many people are learning arabic script? How many might want to look up something written in arabic without it being rendered in absolute nonsense?

> Literally what do you think the words “some degree” mean to you personally?

I answered that in my first post! I can read a tiny tiny bit of Arabic. That puts me into the literal "some degree" group, but I am also definitely in the not-mattering group, because rendering mistakes with Arabic will not cause me any problems with reading.

> Posters have been able to pinpoint the number of fluent speakers, can you give me a ballpark to how many people matter and how many don’t matter?

Have they? But I don't have numbers, I'm just saying that "fluent" is too small and "some degree" is too big.

> This article about rendering text appropriately has taken such a fun turn into sorting folks into groups that “matter” and “don’t matter”?

Are you offended that I classify myself as not mattering in this very specific context? You don't have to make it sound like I'm saying people don't matter in general, jeez.

> If being rigid about these numbers is so important

If a number is worth busting out to make a point, it's worth being correct.

> how many people that don’t matter today might matter next year? How many people are learning arabic script?

What's your point? If the number changes, then use the new number. Don't use a wrong number because it might change later. Or if you have an expected future number, label it as such.

> How many might want to look up something written in arabic without it being rendered in absolute nonsense?

A lot of those people aren't even inside the "some degree" group, so now you're making a different argument. I'd rather not start any new tangents at this point, if you don't mind.

> What's your point?

My point is that you’re trying to use some sort of odd pedantic mark trick to shift the conversation from your experience of “There is a group that I personally don’t care about” to “Math dictates that this is not actually a problem worth addressing.”

Your position that the important takeaway here is actually the importance of scrutinizing pointless minutiae rather than text rendering being fundamentally broken isn’t empirically based. Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.

Like lol, how are people supposed to learn the script if their examples are all messed up? As a maths genious surely you could see the issue with how “impacted people” is somewhere between “fluent people” and “fluent people plus an unknown number of others.” What hard number did you land at when adding unknown variable x to the number of fluent speakers you googled?

> Your entire argument is “look at how clever I am!”, which is fundamentally off-topic when talking about rendering text properly.

I think this is a really uncharitable read of this conversation. This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".

I don't think anyone is trying to refute the author's conclusion that Arabic text rendering is important. I also don't think anyone is trying to show off how clever they are.

Personally, I agree with the author's conclusion, and I thought the post was really neat! But I also think the 2 billion statistic weakened their argument -- it's better to omit a statistic than include the wrong one.

> This thread has been about the veracity and the relevance of the author's claim that "two billion people can read Arabic to some degree".

This is not really true. You tried to center your conclusion that your math was better than the author’s math while distracting from the topic of rendering text properly.

This thread has been about you insisting that people listen to your math and not discuss rendering text properly. lol this thread has been about how clever you are, _not_ rendering text properly.

It's not about the math at all, just "this seems like the wrong group to use as an example". It's a simple point, nobody is trying to show off.

And in these comments I'm assuming that the author has exactly the right number for the group they cited. Because it's really not about math. I have done no calculations and trust the number given. I just think they're citing the wrong statistic. That's why I'm also uninterested in the factors you mentioned that might influence the number up or down. The actual number doesn't matter for this criticism: even if the number in the article happens to match the right statistic, they're still citing the wrong statistic.