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Most people go through life on instinct, first impressions and use heuristics to guide them, and the strategies invariably let them down. Computer scientists,
by maeon3 14y ago
Most people go through life on instinct, first impressions and use heuristics to guide them, and the strategies invariably let them down. Computer scientists, the minority, are obsessive compulsive with things like correct answers to problems and procedures.
This is what makes many accomplished computer scientists seem a bit odd. We use massive amounts of energy to pay attention to the tiniest details and making sure an answer resonates with all known available information.
If you are not careful, paying attention to such remote details gets you to miss the point of the exercise, to socialize and have fun. There is no prize for getting the answer right.
What I gather from this is that 10% of people are abnormally obsessed with being right about every statement, and 90% are not. If one who got the right answer worked hard to correct the others, the others would say: "sheesh, what a nerd, I didn't come on facebook to work!". I came to socialize.
- larrydag 14y agoWhat I find interesting about that obsessive 10% is that's how they socialize. It's the thrill of the challenge. See http://www.kaggle.com http://www.kaggle.com for more communal socializing challenges.
- jbattle 14y agoWorse than that, this hypothetical 10% spends their time and attention on things that the 90% by and large don't value, while giving no attention to things the 90% do care about (like grooming)
- jrajav 14y agoI think you're reading too much into it - the point actually is the puzzle. Some people find it really fun to have their mind challenged, even in small ways like this. It's the same idea as picking up a sudoku every day. The reason that such a low percentage of people got this right is probably the most obvious one: Only those who have a math background (so that they encountered actual problems like this), or who have a natural impulse to be a little OCD about obtaining and verifying the answer, will be likely to get it right the first time. That doesn't mean that both they and those who got it wrong can't have fun with it.