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| What number is halfway between 1 and 9? |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-10-08 21:54:12 |
| "Ask adults from the industrialized world what number is halfway between 1 and 9, and most will say 5. But pose the same question to small children, or people living in some traditional societies, and they're likely to answer 3. Cognitive scientists theorize that that's because it's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically than linearly." Fascinating. The human brain is such a magical machine. |
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| Huh? |
| By weland on 2012-10-08 23:12:30 |
|
I honestly can't tell if this is serious and I'm missing something or they're actually trolling me. It's on web.mit.edu so it should be the former, but sweet mother of God does it look like the latter. The example with "What's halfway between 1 and 9" looks like having confirmation bias written all over it. Incidentally, both 3 and 5 and reasonably close 4.5, although who would round it to 3 is still debatable. Extrapolating that humans prefer, or are somehow predisposed to think logarithmically, is a stretch; one could literally come with an infinity of cases where this doesn't hold. I think practical evidence shows this, too -- have you actually seen how much engineering freshmen fight with logarithmic plots? Who the hell thinks 10 is midway between 1 and 100? Oh wait -- it's base *two* logarithm? Based on the fact that, you know, f(x) = log2(x) is close enough to f(x) = x for small x that you can sort of pretend "some traditional societies" -- a formulation that would trigger raised eyebrows even on wikipedia -- don't mind a little rounding there? Really? The description of the paper itself seems legit (although, since in the well-respected tradition of free flow of ideas, it's only available for a considerable fee, I have no thought of actually checking that out myself), but the way it's covered in the article totally sucks. The paper appears to imply that this kind of rounding doesn't apply to just any kind of numbers, and that it also doesn't apply to just any kind of *information*. Some of our peripheral processing is done logarithmically -- think about sound sensibility, for instance -- so it would make sense if this is how the whole chain would be wired up. How this is connected with the article's introduction, other than the word logarithm, is beyond me. |
 - Score: 2 |
| How do you get 3? |
| By pbassjunk on 2012-10-08 23:26:51 |
|
1 2 3 4 *5* 6 7 8 9 4 on left of 5, 4 on right of 5 1 2*3* 4 5 6 7 8 9 makes no sense either, because there's no way 1 2 6 9 looks anything like the other half of 4 5 7 8 It may just be me, but I can't even generalize the method (for my own amusement/understanding) they are using to come up with this. Edited 2012-10-08 23:32 UTC |
| - Score: 1 |
| 4.5? |
| By sb56637 on 2012-10-08 23:30:20 |
| Am I the only one who immediately said "4.5" for this one? |
| - Score: 3 |
| Huh? |
| By jefro on 2012-10-08 23:37:32 |
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I would have thought it was 1 plus 9 divided by 2. A person who had no simple math skills may have decided to try 3 as a guess. |
| - Score: 1 |
| Comment by Luminair |
| By Luminair on 2012-10-09 00:07:19 |
|
properly insulting this news will take longer than I am able to dedicate right now, so lets just summarize with: this paper is written by phd students practicing "the techniques of information theory" get a real specialization you dropouts! |
| - Score: -1 |
| RE: Huh? |
| By modicr on 2012-10-09 00:09:17 |
|
Correct formula is geometric mean: Sqrt(1*9) = 3 I wonder what would be their answer if the question was the middle of 1 and 16 ??? Edited 2012-10-09 00:11 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| Imagining the numbers |
| By JAlexoid on 2012-10-09 00:20:41 |
| The way that I, personally, imagine the numbers graphically 3 would be on the horizontal line that is equidistant from 9 and 1. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: 4.5? |
| By WereCatf on 2012-10-09 00:37:55 |
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> Am I the only one who immediately said "4.5" for this one? Atleast I answered 5 to the question: 1 to 9 is 8 numbers, half of which is 4, but since we're starting from 1 instead of 0 the answer is 5. A quite typical programming maths problem, actually, you see these kinds of things all the time and beginners doing the exact same mistake as you did. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Huh? |
| By Luminair on 2012-10-09 01:02:29 |
| yeah as usual the article and headline look at fault. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Huh? |
| By cjosc99 on 2012-10-09 01:15:40 |
|
Huh! Huh! Huh1 You are so wrong. The question is half way between 1 and 9 not (0 and 9). The difference between 1 and 9 happens to be 8 and half of 8 happens to be 4. Therefore there is only one correct answer (4). If the question was halfway between 0 and 9 the exact answer will be 4.5 and rounding up to the nearest unit it will be 5. |
| - Score: 0 |
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