4 ms·

I'm saying you can understand the concept and still fail to do a sanity check using that knowledge.

• bradleyjg 12y ago
  It's the difference between understanding in some abstract way and internalizing. Once you've internalized a concept something that is so far out of whack would immediately look wrong. For example: 23894739 x 23894739 = 2 I would expect anyone who has internalized the rules of multiplication to immediately and intuitively reject that. Not that they could tell you what the correct answer is, but know that can't be it at a glance. The claim is that the concept that the arithmetic mean is going to be somewhere between the extreme values in a list is simple and fundamental enough that it should have been similarly internalized by university students.
  • Retra 12y ago
    That doesn't look wrong to me, it just looks like multiplication mod n...
• lotharbot 12y ago
  If you really understand the concept, the sanity check should be almost subconscious. You should see the nonsense answer and be uncomfortable with it, even if you're not explicitly going through a "compare with an estimate" step.