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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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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.

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