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Although the computer-generated charts are statistically meaningless, the persistence of number '17' in humans likely has its reason. The first thing that come
by antonios 16y ago
Although the computer-generated charts are statistically meaningless, the persistence of number '17' in humans likely has its reason.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that this happens because 17 the number from 1 to 20 that we come into most rarely. When we learn multiplication at school, it doesn't have any factors so we tend to skip it, and for the same reason it's rare to encounter it in various problems. This happens also to '7', but '7' is small enough to occur in many occasions such as counting a number of items etc. So, maybe we are more inclined to pick '17' as 'random' because we rarely meet it. Maybe.
- spicyj 16y agoThe same could be said for other primes like 13 and 19, though.
- baddox 16y ago13 has pervasive cultural significance, but I agree that 19 seems as "rare" as 17. Perhaps at a glance 19 is less obviously prime than 17. Also note that 17 and 19 are both ages at which nothing really notable happens. 16 is driving age for lots of states and 18 is a big "legal" milestone.
- jarek 16y ago19 is drinking age in most of Canada. 19 feels too close to the nice, round, important 20 to count as properly random for me.
- electromagnetic 16y agoAgreed 17 really doesn't seem to have any significance anywhere in almost any society.
- pigbucket 16y agoI learned the truth at seventeen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Seventeen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Seventeen)
- roundsquare 16y ago19 is too close to one end (20) so probably people feel its less random when the range is 1 to 20. Also, 9 is divisible by 3, so maybe it feels less random.
- edanm 16y agoI'd bet it's more the "7" effect. When asked to pick a number between 1 and 10, 7 is picked more often than other numbers. Someone below mentioned that magicians often exploit this for their tricks. I'm guessing people think of 7 first, since people are used to choosing between one and ten. Then, on reflection, they choose 17 instead since they want to have used the whole range of options.