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Half a dozen somehow sounds more impressive than six...
by kaetemi 7y ago
Half a dozen somehow sounds more impressive than six...
- meheleventyone 7y agoHah, yes! Although six individual companies spinning up a prototype in quick order is pretty impressive as well.
- hnarn 7y agoTangentially (this is HN after all) I also feel like "half a dozen" gives a more fuzzy confidence interval than a regular number ("6"). Of course, half a dozen literally means the amount 6, but am I the only one that reads them slightly differently? I almost see an implicit "about" before the phrase: "[about] half a dozen".
- polytely 7y agoIt's actually a really interesting subject, I think it's closely related to something called "words of estimate probability", the wikipedia article [0] is a good startingpoint. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_estimative_probability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_estimative_probabilit...
- bcrosby95 7y agoIt's a technique you can use in software estimation too. There's an implied difference between saying something will take about 2 months vs 8 weeks vs 57 days, even if they're all technically the same amount of time.
- kaetemi 7y agoAnd we can assume that means 57 bank/gov't working days, which could easily be about 3 years. :)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jdmichal 7y agoBigger scales typically include an implicit amount of wiggle within the lower scales. People understand that when you say a car cost "25 thousand", that it's not exactly 25,000, but that it's closer to 25,000 than 24,000 or 26,000. Moving to a bigger scale, and then back down to a smaller scale maintains that implicit wiggle room.