Perhaps it would be beneficial to use a unary numeral system when discussing topics on which biases like scope insensitivity, probability neglect, and placing too much weight on outcomes that are likely to occur. Using a unary numeral system could prevent these biases by presenting a more visual representation of the numbers, which might give readers more intuition on them and thus be less biased about them. Here’s an example: “One study found that people are willing to pay $80 to save || 1000 (2,000) birds, but only $88 to save |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 1000 (200,000 birds).”
A unary number system is a really fancy name to an ASCII graph :)
Reminds me of the “irony meter” some of my friends use instead of smilies, as smilies are binary, while this can express that something is almost but but not quite serious: [...........|.....]
The popular method right now seems to be using areas of shapes or heights of bars on graphs when this sort of visual representation is necessary.
However, I like the way you showed it here, mostly because I have wanted to enter repeating sequences of characters like that into a comment on this site to see what it would look like. ;). I hope people represent numbers with long lines of repeating characters on this website more often. I vote for alternating ‘0’ & ‘O’.
Though using bar graphs is pretty, it often seems to take up too much space and takes a bit too long to make in some cases. I suppose both bar graphs and unary numeral systems are useful, and which one to use depends on how much space you’re willing to use up.
Edit: Also, why alternating 0s and Os? To make counting them easier?
I asked for them because
(a)I want to highlight long lines of characters in the LW comment interface and watch the Mac anti-aliasing overlap with itself, which looks cool, and
(b)I don’t want to just post a series of comments that have no valuable content but are just playing with the reply nesting system and posting repeating lines of characters and whatnot, because I don’t want to get down voted into oblivion.
Alternating 0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O
is visually appealing to me, and I want to see visually appealing things, so I asked to see more visually appealing things on the website. The request was made purely for selfish reasons.
If you would like to be horrified, represent the number of deaths from WWII in unary in a text document and scroll through it (by copy pasting larger and larger chunks, or by some other method).
There are about 4000 “1” characters in a page in MS Word, so at 20 million battle deaths, you’ll get about 5000 pages.
If you really want to be horrified, make a document with one “I” for every sentient being whose life would be prevented from an existential catastrophe. Oh wait, that’s too many to store in memory...
Perhaps it would be beneficial to use a unary numeral system when discussing topics on which biases like scope insensitivity, probability neglect, and placing too much weight on outcomes that are likely to occur. Using a unary numeral system could prevent these biases by presenting a more visual representation of the numbers, which might give readers more intuition on them and thus be less biased about them. Here’s an example: “One study found that people are willing to pay $80 to save || 1000 (2,000) birds, but only $88 to save |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 1000 (200,000 birds).”
Edit: Made it a bit easier to read.
A unary number system is a really fancy name to an ASCII graph :)
Reminds me of the “irony meter” some of my friends use instead of smilies, as smilies are binary, while this can express that something is almost but but not quite serious: [...........|.....]
The popular method right now seems to be using areas of shapes or heights of bars on graphs when this sort of visual representation is necessary.
However, I like the way you showed it here, mostly because I have wanted to enter repeating sequences of characters like that into a comment on this site to see what it would look like. ;). I hope people represent numbers with long lines of repeating characters on this website more often. I vote for alternating ‘0’ & ‘O’.
Though using bar graphs is pretty, it often seems to take up too much space and takes a bit too long to make in some cases. I suppose both bar graphs and unary numeral systems are useful, and which one to use depends on how much space you’re willing to use up.
Edit: Also, why alternating 0s and Os? To make counting them easier?
I asked for them because (a)I want to highlight long lines of characters in the LW comment interface and watch the Mac anti-aliasing overlap with itself, which looks cool, and (b)I don’t want to just post a series of comments that have no valuable content but are just playing with the reply nesting system and posting repeating lines of characters and whatnot, because I don’t want to get down voted into oblivion.
Alternating 0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O0O is visually appealing to me, and I want to see visually appealing things, so I asked to see more visually appealing things on the website. The request was made purely for selfish reasons.
I can see that. Still, 0s and Os take up more space than | and take a bit longer to type due to needing to alternate them.
If you would like to be horrified, represent the number of deaths from WWII in unary in a text document and scroll through it (by copy pasting larger and larger chunks, or by some other method).
There are about 4000 “1” characters in a page in MS Word, so at 20 million battle deaths, you’ll get about 5000 pages.
If you really want to be horrified, make a document with one “I” for every sentient being whose life would be prevented from an existential catastrophe. Oh wait, that’s too many to store in memory...