Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time.
Ender
Karma: 53
Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time.
Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time
Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time
Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous or influential at the time.
In the situation you described, it would be necessary to test values that did and didn’t match the hypothesis, which ends up working an awful lot like adjusting away from an anchor. Is there a way of solving the 2 4 6 problem without coming up with a hypothesis too early?
In the situation you described, it would be necessary to test values that did and didn’t match the hypothesis, which ends up working an awful lot like adjusting away from an anchor. Is there a way of solving the 2 4 6 problem without coming up with a hypothesis too early?
Following what Constant has pointed out, I am wondering if there is, in fact, a way to solve the 2 4 6 problem without first guessing, and then adjusting your guess.
Following what Constant has pointed out, I am wondering if there is, in fact, a way to solve the 2 4 6 problem without first guessing, and then adjusting your guess.
There were actually a few times (in my elementary school education) when I didn’t understand why certain techniques that the teacher taught were supposed to be helpful (for reasons which I only recently figured out). The problem of subtracting 8 from 35 would be simplified as such;
35 − 8 = 20 + (15 − 8)
I never quite got why this made the problem “easier” to solve, until, looking back recently, I realized that I was supposed to have MEMORIZED “15 − 8 = 7!”
At the time, I simplified it to this, instead. 35 − 8 = 30 + (5 − 8) = 20 + 10 + (-3) = 27, or, after some improvement, 35 − 8 = 30 - (8 − 5) = 30 − 3 = 20 + 10 − 3 = 27.
Evidently, I was happier using negative numbers than I was memorizing the part of the subtraction table where I need to subtract one digit numbers from two digit numbers.
I hated memorization.
I should begin by saying that I caught myself writing my conclusion as the first sentence of this post, and then doing the math. I’m doing the calculations entirely in terms of the victim’s time, which is quantifiable.
Dust specks would take up a much smaller portion of the victims’ lifes (say, a generous 9 seconds of blinking out of 2483583120 seconds of life expectancy (78.7 years) per person), whereas torture would take up a whole fifty years of a single person’s life.
All of my math came crashing down when I realized that 3^^^3 is a bigger number than my brain can really handle. Scope insensitivity makes me want to choose the dust.
Would anyone really care about the dust, though? I mean, 9/2483583120 is a fairly small number, all things considered.
The law of large numbers says yes. If there is an infinitesimal chance of someone, say, getting into a lethal car accident because of a dust speck in their eye, then it will happen a whole bunch of times and people will die. If the dust could cause an infection and blind someone, it will happen a whole bunch of times. That would be worse than one persons torture.
But if the conditions are such that none of that will happen to the people—they are brought into a controlled environment at at a convenient time and given sterile dust specks (if you are capable of putting dust in so many people’s eyes at will, then you are probably powerful enough to do anything)--then no individual person would really care about it. A dust fleck simply doesn’t hurt as badly a torture. Every single person would just forget about it.
So, if you mean “a dust fleck’s worth of discomfort”, then I choose the dust. If you mean dust specks in people’s eyes, then I choose the torture.
“World Development Indicators | Data.” Data | The World Bank. The World Bank Group, 2011. Web. 23 Aug. 2011. http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators?cid=GPD_WDI.
In the end, the crime is committed not by the person who has to choose between two presented evils, but by the person who sets up the choice. Choose the lesser of the evils, preferably with math, and then don’t feel responsible.
I think, based on everyone’s level of discomfort with this problem, that if there were an experiment wherein people in one group were asked a question like this, but on a much smaller scale, say, “torture one person for an hour or put a speck of dust into the eyes of (3^^^3)/438300,” or even one second of torture vs (3^^^3)/1577880000 (Obviously in decimal notation in the experiment) specks of dust, and in the second group, people were told the original question with the big numbers, people in the first group would choose the torture more often and much more quickly and confidently.
I say this because people are quite uncomfortable having to choose to torture someone for 50 years, even if it isn’t necessarily as bad as the other option.
The mention of music and evolution sent me off on a tangent, which was to wonder why human brains have a sense of music. A lot of music theory makes mathematical sense (the overtone series), but it seems odd from an evolution standpoint that musicianship was a good allele to have.
Teehee… “Men are from Mars...”
This isn’t entirely relevant, but it’s a good story, so… I recently heard from one of my mom’s friends that my fifth grade teacher won the lottery, and continued teaching afterward. This makes me very happy, because he’s a fantastic teacher (he has a reputation, actually, for making his classes really fun, like using remote-control cars for an Oregon Trail activity), and, as has been mentioned on this site, a lot of people don’t end up being very happy once they’ve one the lottery. I’m glad Mr. Lesh was smart enough to keep teaching his class, which he obviously loved doing.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that, and I don’t know how it happened.
Now cryonics are starting to sound like a religion; if you are an interesting person, and have a good enough reputation, then someone will bother to reanimate you and you will live forever. I like it.
I heard about this study in the book Moonwalking with Einstien: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer. Apparently there was only one test subject who seemed to have eidetic memory, and instead of doing more tests after the one that you described, the experimenter married the subject.
When John Merritt put a similar test in newspapers, nobody who wrote in with the correct answer could do the test “with scientists looking over their shoulders.”
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Actually, I think that historians would love to wake up random people from way back when, whether or not they were famous at the time.