The author has been pretty negative on LW so I’m kind of expecting this to be a (failed?) experiment to demonstrate that LW will just eat up any idea that sounds clever. (If not then I’m sorry for sounding dismissive, but wanted to register this prediction.)
The main issue I see with the thesis (even in theory, ignoring that it’s not practical) is, as Richard said,
Consider 3,124,203,346 (or ↗643,302,421,3). Suppose we don’t just care about the rough magnitude, but about its exact value. In our current system, you have to count the number of digits in a large number – reading to the right – and then jump back to the beginning of the number in order to read off its exact value.
This just isn’t true? We don’t count the number of digits. That’s not how human vision works. We recognize the length of the number almost instantly and then read the number from left to right. This example here is about as large as it can get for this principle to still hold (and it wouldn’t work without separators), but the vast majority of relevant numbers we read are small enough. And even here, I just look at this number, without counting, and my brain goes “billion!”
The author has been pretty negative on LW so I’m kind of expecting this to be a (failed?) experiment to demonstrate that LW will just eat up any idea that sounds clever. (If not then I’m sorry for sounding dismissive, but wanted to register this prediction.)
The main issue I see with the thesis (even in theory, ignoring that it’s not practical) is, as Richard said,
This just isn’t true? We don’t count the number of digits. That’s not how human vision works. We recognize the length of the number almost instantly and then read the number from left to right. This example here is about as large as it can get for this principle to still hold (and it wouldn’t work without separators), but the vast majority of relevant numbers we read are small enough. And even here, I just look at this number, without counting, and my brain goes “billion!”