Dear Americans,
While spending a holiday in the New Orleans and Mississippi region, I was baffled by the typical temperatures in air-conditioned rooms. The point of air conditioning is to make people feel comfortable, right? It is obviously very bad at achieving this. I saw shivering girls with blue lips waiting in the airport. I saw ladies wearing a jacket with them which they put on as soon as they entered an air-conditioned room. The rooms were often so cold that I felt relieved the moment I left them and went back into the heat. Cooling down less than to the optimally comfortable temperature would make some economical and ecological sense, and would make the transition between outside and inside less brutal. Cooling down more seems patently absurd.
What is going on here? Some possible explanations that come to mind:
Employees who have to wear suits and ties prefer lower temperatures than tourists in shorts and T-shirts.
Overweight people prefer lower temperatures than skinny girls, and the high obesity rates in America are well-known.
Some places (like airports) may intentionally want to prevent people from hanging around for too long without a good reason.
Still, the above points seem nowhere near sufficient to explain the phenomenon. The temperatures seem uncomfortably low even for people wearing a suit with a tie. Places like cinemas clearly want their customers to feel comfortable, and their employees don’t wear suits.
Thanks for clarifying.
Not sure how much sense it makes to take the arithmetic mean of probabilities when the odds vary over many orders of magnitude. If the average is, say, 30%, then it hardly matters whether someone answers 1% or .000001%. Also, it hardly matters whether someone answers 99% or 99.99999%.
I guess the natural way to deal with this would be to average (i.e., take the arithmetic mean of) the order of magnitude of the odds (i.e., log[p/(1-p)], p someone’s answer). Using this method, it would make a difference whether someone is “pretty certain” or “extremely certain” that a certain statement is true or false.
Does anyone know what the standard way for dealing with this issue is?