Why does this matter? They clearly have no aptitude and weren't going to be able to peruse it further. What's the loss if they're "put off" of it?
I agree with this when it comes to people who are too stupid/lack the aptitude to do it. That said there's a discussion to be had on how some of this is taught. Wanna know an effective way to turn someone off statistics? Make them find the median of 30 unordered numbers by hand. That's what they had me do during the stats portion of one of my middle school math classes. It's one thing to use less tedious examples to teach the concept, but making people do problems like that when a computer would do them in the real world is a good way to make people hate the topic regardless of aptitude or IQ.
I agree with this when it comes to people who are too stupid/lack the aptitude to do it. That said there's a discussion to be had on how some of this is taught. Wanna know an effective way to turn someone off statistics? Make them find the median of 30 unordered numbers by hand. That's what they had me do during the stats portion of one of my middle school math classes. It's one thing to use less tedious examples to teach the concept, but making people do problems like that when a computer would do them in the real world is a good way to make people hate the topic regardless of aptitude or IQ.