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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide).

I disagree here. It is actually absolutely counterintuitive how shallow the ocean is compared to the surface. Also the whole how thin the crust of the earth actually is.

Right now I think that people want to shape narrative of dumb rich arabs to punish the Qatar and Fifa for the audacity to not be progressive on the world stage and not even pretending to pay a lip service to western values.

The gulf states has extremely low labor costs. I would be surprised if the whole thing costed more than couple of billion of hard costs.

Them spending that much on infrastructure in the last 12 years is plausible - but they also have a lot of big ticket stuff built. I would say they will try to become something like - a bit more conservative Dubai.

For ocean depth my reference point is knowing a little about oil drilling and how deep that can go. Then guessing that different parts of the ocean do not have more than a 3-4 difference in magnitude.

The gulf states has extremely low labor costs.

But I would also not be surprised if the harsh conditions require significant engineering work and/or complexity that are not present in all comparable projects, which to some extent makes things more expensive.

I disagree here. It is actually absolutely counterintuitive how shallow the ocean is compared to the surface. Also the whole how thin the crust of the earth actually is.

Also, how many people actually randomly know what the width of the USA is? I certainly don't, and tbh I doubt I'll remember it past 10 minutes from now. It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain.

It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain

Hardly completely useless. Knowing the rough width of the US will augment your ability to make all sorts of potentially useful heuristic judgments about distances, times, areas, and speeds both within and beyond the US. For example, if you know (or ever learn) the duration of a flight from New York to LA, and you know the rough width of the US, then you can make an OoM estimate of the speed of a jet airliner, which could allow you to estimate other flight times for known distances.

Someone may say that they can Google this stuff if you ever need to know it, but that presumes that you’ll always know when it’s a good time to seek it out, and that’s not always the case. More to the point, inert information on Google can’t help build good epistemic filters, nor can it contribute to creative problem-solving. Knowledge of a broad set of useful facts is very important, and should be a lifelong endeavour for those who want to get the most out of their intelligence.

There's the old saw that Americans have no concept of time and Europeans no concept of distance

You've just proved my point. The example you give of a useful scenario is something which would never, ever be useful to me. I stand by my statement that this is a useless fact.

Your insistence that being able to better estimate speeds,distances and times being "useless" reads more as arrogance than sincere disinterest. Because its not really asking much from you, we ask middle schoolers to do this all the time.

Not to mention being able to accurately estimate those things transfer over to estimating money, timescales, populations, etc. A very valuable skill in making sense of the vast amount of numbers all around you and having a well calibrated bullshit detector.

The alternative is literally memorising things that are "useful". Books can be written on why that is stupid.

In fact I would say the whole covid restrictions fiasco was a result of the masses having bad meta-estimation intuition. They got spooked by arbitrarily large numbers of people dying, with no context to what level of death is acceptable or how much death (or lost life years) is caused by lockdowns and money printing.

I never said estimating distances is useless. I said that estimating the distance of the entire country is useless. In 37 years I have never once needed to know that, and I would bet good money that I never will.

So estimating distances in the abstract is not useless but estimating the distance of the US is? I don't understand how this is contradictory. If you know how to estimate distances, you can estimate the distances of anything to anything else.

The base-level skill is what is being discussed, not a gameified application of that skill. "Estimating the distance of the US from coast to coast" is not the skill, estimating distances is.

No, what is discussed is very specifically the width of the US, and whether it's useful to know that. This is not an abstract discussion about estimating distances in general.

It's just order of magnitudes. I don't expect you to know the US is 2500 miles across. I expect you to know it's not 250 or 25,000.

"It took me 5 hours to drive across Iowa at 60 miles per hour, so Iowa is around 300 miles across. There's no way the ocean is deeper than that." Or, if that doesn't satisfy you, "therefore the continental United States is around 3000 miles wide which is roughly the radius of the Earth. There's no way the ocean's deepest point is anywhere close to 10% of the radius of the Earth".

There's no way the ocean's deepest point is anywhere close to 10% of the radius of the Earth

And now explain your reasoning why if we assume that the person slept through natural science classes. Or never finished high school.

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