Truth in Truncating Insignificant Numbers
We’re watching a movie and one of the main characters say a number — it’s not really significant to the plot, but it’s the only number they’ve said during the movie — so if I asked you to remember the part of the movie where they said a number, you might have some episodic memory of it.
In this case, the number said during the film was: 1389
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The next day, when recalling the scene (why I was, I don’t know for sure) to the person who watched it with me, we had differing memories.
My recall: 1375
Their recall: 138
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That’s astoundingly different… but who is closer to being right?
Starting with me: 1/3/x/x - I got the one and three right, and I knew the number was four digits long.
They: 1/3/8/x - got all of the digits that they used correct, but were off by an order of magnitude.
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It differs by how we treat numbers as information.
Their memory formed on each individual word the character said, (“one thousand, three hundred, eighty-nine”)… two theories to this: 1) the “eighty-nine” pairs off similarly two the “one-thousand” and “three-hundred” so upon recall it just becomes, “138” as significant to remember; or 2) they do similarly, “one…three…eight…” but then — not being important to the film in any way — they don’t even bother to get to “…nine” before not caring.
My memory formed an idea after the first contextual “one thousand” to create a template for the next words to fill in — “one thousand” immediately implies “1/n/n/n” where “n” can be any digit”. Then the character says the next words, “three hundred…” and now that I have heard the magnitude and the first two digits, I also get lazy and my brain rounds the number like this —> 1/2/hh, where “hh” is high numbers (like 89/100 or 75/100).
Are we both lazy? Maybe.. or both efficient enough to know the number didn’t matter — but we still remembered it, and we remembered it differently, so why is there a difference.
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For context, I like math and they despise it.