These are the three questions of the Cognitive Reflection Test:
(1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost? __ cents
(2) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? __ minutes
(3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? __ days
Here's another question for the Cognitive Reflection Test:
In a study of 3,428 university students, 50% of participants across Harvard, MIT and Princeton got a question wrong on a Cognitive Reflection Test. What percentage of MIT students got the question wrong?
Here's ChatGPT's responses. It's fascinating that it provides the same incorrect answers as people... I'm not sure how to interpret this from the robot.
(1) "The ball costs $0.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, so it costs $1.00 + $0.10 = $1.10 in total."
(2) "If 5 machines can make 5 widgets in 5 minutes, then each machine can make 1 widget in 5 minutes / 5 machines = 1 minute. Therefore, 100 machines can make 100 widgets in 100 minutes."
(3) "If it takes 48 days for the patch of lily pads to cover the entire lake and the patch doubles in size every day, it would take half that time, or 24 days, for the patch to cover half of the lake."
Great article. I’ve tried prompts to remind myself “don’t get angry” but tbh it hasn’t helped. Instead I’ll try remind myself “don’t feel attacked” and ask for some time to think
I can't speak more highly of Ryan Singer's work on Shape Up. It has transformed how we approach work by inverting the question from "how long something is going to take" to "how long do we want to spend on this".
I don’t think that was ever a supported view. When I was in high school decades ago the view, even then, was that it came from somewhere in Asia, probably China.
They knew with a high degree of certainty the plague spread along the Silk Road carried by blood feeding parasites on rats. They had timelines of outbreaks well documented, but they didn’t know where it first infected humans.
Thank you for sharing. This is the first chapter from Todd Rose's excellent book The End of Average. In the book, he also touches on the fascinating topic of context. For example there is no such thing as a person's average level of aggression - IF I am around my parents I tend to get aggressive, but IF I am around friends and strangers I am calm.
Even Rose's article (I haven't read his book yet so I can't really say about that) tiptoes around what was going on here. It wasn't just a naive application of statistics. Rose gets through the Norma story without mentioning eugenics once, but the whole episode is so obviously part of America's pre-WWII eugenics swoon. Beyond specific beliefs about politics, race or genetics, but linked to them, there was a whole Zeitgeist, the collectivist spirit of the age that gave us Busby Berkeley musical numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysvQ5MaUbd8 and the IBM company songbook https://www.networkworld.com/article/2333702/a-history-of-si... . This was a time when it was acceptable, indeed it was progressive, to be violently hostile to difference or defectiveness: see for example War Against the Weakhttps://waragainsttheweak.com/ and, maybe most especially, The Black Storkhttps://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-black-stork-9780... . And of course it's no coincidence that the pioneers of statistics tended to be particular fans of eugenics themselves.
Today, you are likely more valuable to YouTube watching ads. In the latest earnings call Alphabet CFO made the comment:
"both YouTube Music Premium and YouTube TV do have higher content acquisition costs as a percentage of revenues than YouTube ads and we are early there continuing to build out that subscriber base."
YouTube still pays out the majority of subscription revenue to publishers based on viewership but likely must also pay out more to music creators and labels. This is also not counting the costs of its original content.
(1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? __ cents
(2) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? __ minutes
(3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? __ days