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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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| RE: 4.5? |
| By Doc Pain on 2012-10-09 12:59:30 |
|
> Am I the only one who immediately said "4.5" for this one? Sometimes, Winston, it's 4. Sometimes it is 5. Sometimes it is 3. And sometimes it is all of them at once. :-) |
 - Score: 4 |
| Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-10-09 13:39:39 |
|
My guess would be 5. My 9 year old son said 5, but then said it could also be 5.5. So five seems to be the dominant number in any answer. More interesting (IMHO): Yesterday I was listening to a podcast where someone said 0.999999999999-> ad inifinitum is the same as exactly 1, because there is no other number between those two numbers so they must be the same. In practice they are basically the same thing of course, but in maths they shouldn't be, then again they are. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Did those answering "3" even understand the question? |
| By theosib on 2012-10-09 13:53:46 |
| This seems like a lot of work to explain a peculiar result, when I see no evidence that the researchers even tried to verify that those answering 3 (or even 5) actually understood the question. The bias could come from having an unexpected interpretation of "half way," where a more careful definition might yield a different answer. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By Radio on 2012-10-09 15:09:50 |
| No, no, in maths too, they are the same number. It is only a problem of notation. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Did those answering "3" even understand the question? |
| By kwan_e on 2012-10-09 15:13:30 |
|
> This seems like a lot of work to explain a peculiar result, when I see no evidence that the researchers even tried to verify that those answering 3 (or even 5) actually understood the question. The bias could come from having an unexpected interpretation of "half way," where a more careful definition might yield a different answer. You, like a lot of the other commenters, missed the point of this research. This research isn't about testing how smart or dumb people are. The research is about teasing out the way the brain actually works. That's why they want people to answer intuitively without thinking much about it. That way, we can see that 1) There really is a discrepancy between our intuition and learned behaviour 2) What form this discrepancy takes. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: Did those answering "3" even understand the question? |
| By Savior on 2012-10-09 15:48:20 |
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> The research is about teasing out the way the brain actually works. That's why they want people to answer intuitively without thinking much about it. I still find it difficult to believe that people would actually answer 3. Maybe there are such people, but the article does not quote the related statistics from the paper, and the wording does not make me believe it even could. (Anyway, small children can't count). Also, this simple question does not form a very strong basis for building a whole theory on (in all fairness, judging from the article, they have other arguments). I would be interested what people who answered 3 (if there ARE such people) would answer to other ranges, e.g. 1 and 50 (most likely 10, not 7), 1 and 16 or 1 and 100. I like to play with the thought that as the number gets bigger, the answers would converge to the arithmetic mean. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Here is the correct test |
| By jefro on 2012-10-09 16:59:47 |
| Next test would be to tell them you'll pay them in between 5 and 10 dollars and hour and see what they come up with. Bet they now say 10 dollars. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Look at the numerals |
| By unclefester on 2012-10-10 02:19:28 |
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> Well, if this were true, I'd expect at least some languages to exhibit at least traits of logarithmic numerals. There are different systems: octal, decimal, duodecimal, you name it, but I'm afraid logarithmic is just not one of them. I call rubbish, in the modern American pseudo-scientific and splendidly pleased with oneself style. There are logarithmic numerical expressions in all languages - eg small, large, huge. In pre-agrarian socities there is no real need for precise numerals larger than about 5. It is easy enough to divide food by visual means or describe a distance as "three days walking". |
| - Score: 3 |
| read the article before commenting |
| By unclefester on 2012-10-10 08:37:08 |
|
I notice that virtually no one commneting seems to have read the actual paper. It talks about how children and traditional hunter-gatherers think about numbers. One of the researchers' assumptions is that if you were designing a nervous system for humans living in the ancestral environment — with the aim that it accurately represent the world around them — the right type of error to minimize would be relative error, not absolute error. After all, being off by four matters much more if the question is whether there are one or five hungry lions in the tall grass around you than if the question is whether there are 96 or 100 antelope in the herd you've just spotted. |
| - Score: 3 |
| it depends on your training |
| By unclefester on 2012-10-10 08:45:02 |
| I originally trained as a chemist. Chemists often spend more of their time dealing with logarithmic data than linear data. In fact I'm probably far more comfortable dealing with logarithms (base 10) than linear data. |
| - Score: 3 |
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