How to explain to Americans: If You remove 3 bullets out of an Gen 4 Glock 26 9mm 12-Round magazine, that’s 1/4. If you remove 4 bullets, that’s 1/3. The police can shoot one more unarmed black man with 1/3 of the magazine than 1/4.
The cake analogy is better and still appeals to Americans because it is cake.
Yeah but they already failed with the burger analogy. And it’s a burger.
Since you didn’t get it, you can cut a cake visually and have it make sense where you can’t with burgers.
Cut a cake into 4 pieces, another cake into 3 pieces, the cake with 4 pieces, each piece is a 1/4 piece, the other cake for 3 and 1/3, which is bigger?
It’s easy so I’m confused why you didn’t get it.
You have a real talent for talking down to people
Yeah, when I talk as I normally do to people they don’t understand me so I need to get on their level most of the time and that pisses me off because it really doesn’t take much effort to have a decent vocabulary and a basic understanding of how the world works so I end up being bitter, misanthropic and sarcastic nearly all of the time.
80% of my life I feel like wherever I go I’m talking to stubborn, self-important children who think anything they don’t understand cannot exist.
And it’s been that way for more than 4 decades now, so yeah, I talk down to people a lot because most of the time that’s all you understand.
You have to respect that people are smart in different ways. The human mind has to spend its time doing something.
Likely the people you meet have completely tangential interests to yours and so you don’t notice their intelligence, but there will always be a topic that someone else is expert in to which you are a novice in.
The key is to bridge those small interest overlaps by finding a common vocabulary that you can use as a basis for examples. If you truly understand a topic, you should be able to create digestible examples for it.
Refusing to compromise on this is more a sign of immaturity and insecurity, than a consolidation of your intellect.
You have to respect that people are smart in different ways.
Yes, Drumpf is an idiot for everything except manipulating people. Should I ‘respect’ his ability to literally get away consequence free with *Gestures wildly at EVERYTHING*
so you don’t notice their intelligence,
No, most people are idiots through and through, some people have self-improving interests and hobbies that gives them greater breadth of though, but I’d argue that’s less than 20% of the population.
Most people have a calcified worldview built from things their families and friends tell them with very little self-examination that they are STUBBORNLY resistant to shedding, and will ghost family instead of addressing their internal conflicts.
Look I get you have a positive view of humanity and at one point so did I but I cannot stress to you the importance of the fact that 60-70% of the population are basically just children that refuse to leave the Concrete Operational mode.
Believe it or not I don’t need the concept of fractions explaining to me by a self-important arse.
Statistically, most Americans do.
The cake is a lie.
No, they can’t. They need 3-4 full magazines to hit once.
Troll gave it away by calling them “signs”
Welcome Ken M energy
i know the guy on discord and he was actually put into a book as well
“Somehow it’s ok for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
It’s been this way for a long time now unfortunately.
Chuckle? Hell I know full grown adults in their fifties who wear their mathematical ignorance as a badge of pride!
It’s like they’re clinging to their youth so desperately, that they continue on with the high school trope that only nerds who are undeserving of social interaction know math.
Meanwhile, they also tend to continuously moan online how broke they are - inevitably from decades of poor financial decisions that landed them under a mountain of usurious debt with double digit compounding interest.
They also like to get grammatically pedantic on the regular to show off their superior language skills - usually when they’ve got nothing of value to contribute to the conversation or they know they’ve been bested, so better point out those autocorrect errors.
Feels like you’ve a specific person in mind.
Specific people. Plural. But yes, real life acquaintances are referenced.
Honestly, if you’re good enough at math, you don’t need to be very good at reading. The reverse isn’t true.
In my eyes, if you don’t understand 1/3 > 1/4, then ya might as well be an illiterate dolt. It’s one of the first things you learn in school along with reading. Might as well consider your self a primary school dropout.
The American education system (for my old millennial ass)
“Memorize this. No I will not explain how it works or why. Memorize it take the test and leave me alone.”
Me who is physically incapable of memorizing seemingly arbitrary stuff and needs to understand for it to stick: I guess fuck me then huh? 1/4 pounder it is!
I learned more about algebra from making games in BASIC than I ever did in any class.
no wonder people learn to hate math
Sounds like you were in the “regular” class. I went to the smart kid class, and they did a much better job of explaining stuff.
Yeah I definitely was. Our regular class of 30 kids in one classroom, one graduation class of 900… The goddamn school was a city of 2,000 kids… Of all those kids, and therefore all those parents paying taxes, we somehow couldn’t afford paper one year. Of my class of 900, 400 graduated. That should tell you something about the shithole I come from lol
Ouch.
Sounds a hell of a lot like my Australian school experience.
My high school was great, if you were doing poorly in a class then next year they’d put you in an easier class to bring up your average grade (And if that didn’t work, then they’d just ignore you).
I once had a mortgage advisor point at a more than sign and go “is that more or less? I never can remember”
Like, why did you get into this job? I ended up not taking his advice.
I know there is a syntactically correct way that everyone knows and accepts, but it does depend on what the expression is.
Do you write it 5 > 3 or 3 < 5?
I don’t understand your question, both of those are correct.
When I was in elementary school I knew how to use the signs but not how to read them. So I’d always read it as greater than and flip it. So 3 < 5 I would read out loud as “5 is greater than 3”. My teacher quickly corrected me though. So it was only for like a week or so.
Well, that’s a correct statement, you don’t have to say “less than” to read that statement accurately.
Exactly, both of those statements convey the same information but are encoded in different ways.
To a foreigner, seeing the > < brackets may be more contextual than it is symbolic.
“To a foreigner”?
You know “<” and “>” aren’t English expressions, right…?
You’re arguing 6x3 or 3x6
They’re the same
Yes, but if you have
5 > 3, you can read the “>” in two different ways:- 5 is greater than 3 (reading left to right)
- 3 is less than 5 (reading right to left)
So which one is the correct way to spell out “>”? I also was confused about that for some time, since I was taught that the pointy end always points to the smaller number which is intuitive and can very easily be remembered, but I still had to memorize which symbol is pronounced as “less than” and which is pronounced as “greater than” until I realized that at least in every language I speak it’s always read from left to right.
It still takes a bit of a second for me once in a while these days to remember the correct name for the signs when I see them.
The way my mind works is I find it faster to reconstruct the meaning every time rather than attempt to memorize which one is said which way.
Example: 3<5
My mind:
-
3 is the small number / 5 is the large number.
-
How do I say that in a sentence?
-
Three is less than five.
I do the math, not remember the definition.
-
I don’t understand where you’re coming from. In my mind it’s so straight forward
If english is your first and main language, then there is no confusion mapping “less than” → <, and “greater than” → >.
If english is not your first and main language, then you might hesitate or ask for clarification on the symbols, or guess from the context.
We were always told < is less than. The symbol looks like an L for Less. If the L is facing the wrong way > it’s greater than.
no, those use the same operator. My example uses two different operators for the same result
3÷0.16666
18 of one and a dozen and a half of the other.
They are expressed the same principles. I’d even say they are “encoded” in the same way.
Try to compete with McDonald’s marketing on their brand new 1/4 pounder
Get absolutely destroyed when piggy-backing their marketing strategy fails
Blame the customer for not understanding fractions
It’s literally what happened…
why the fuck are you greentexting it sarcastically
and
who the hell are the 18 other people that thought you were making sense?
who the hell are the 18 other people that thought you were making sense?
The same kinda people who would have assumed the 1/4 pounder was bigger 30 years ago
fuck you’re right, should have realized that…
Except it’s not true. That was just the excuse A&W made when going bankrupt. No one else had problems selling 1/3lb burgers in the US.
It was literally reported in newspapers at the time, angry people posting in the opinions section about how A&W was ‘ripping people off’
And no other existing fast food chain at the time marketed a 1/3 burger.
Source: I am fucking old.
Now can you explain to me why so many people assume your bullshit to be right?
for some reason people love to revisit things like this and find post hoc justifications for dumb fucks to make them look smarter. it happens a lot with elon and TFG too.
but the one timeless example that pisses me off the most is W’s “fool me once” flub. every time it’s mentioned, so many people come to his defense, adamant that it was on purpose! supposedly he didn’t want to have a clip of him saying “shame on me” on camera to be used against him in political ads and whatnot. not like we have tons of evidence that he was a fuckwit before that, and never mind that there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be so propagated like it’s a fact…
but this is such bs on so many levels that I’m getting angry even right now thinking about it. wow! such marvelous political instincts… he sure didn’t end up giving a much worse soudbite that made him look like an absolute buffoon now, did he? what a savant!
no, people can be stupid. but also the american public in general? come on… there’s areas in which you can try to save your national pride, math ain’t one of them.
Wasn’t this proven false long ago? Snopes says it’s true. 🤷
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/
Yeah, I would think so. No other restaurant had problems selling 1/3lb burgers. Braums and Carls Jr sling them by the truckload. Almost all the small family restaurants here sell their burgers by 1/3lb 2/3lb sizes. And I don’t exactly live in an area known for it’s high intelligence. So I’m calling shenanigans.
Every record that I can find says Carls Jr debut their 1/3 lb thickburger in 2002 and Braum’s was founded in the 1980s.
So they were absolutely NOT contemporaries of A&W when they were marketing their 1/3 lb burgers.
I’m not really sure what people like you get from coming here and lying on the internet, but I am so fuckdamn tired of it.
Username checks out.
Edit: the claim in the OP is “1/3lb burger failed in america” nothing to do with the 80’s. Lots of places still sell 1/3lb burgers 40 years later.
Video games also failed in America. Some even thought it would never come back into prominence, and I don’t recall if it’s related but the writer of the Wticher books sold rights for the game in hard cash and not percentage of profit because he thought they’d never make money as a video game.
Failed and such doesn’t mean forever. Things can change or changes in advertising/quality control can restore dead markets. Now maybe this means as you said it wasn’t American stupidity, but were also talking Americans who supported segregation at one time and by majority now do not. As different people grow up or even if people heard about this and learned to be less dumb, the conditions in which the original failure could have changed, making the statement true at the time.
Then they aren’t contemporaries of the time when A&W debut their 1/3 burger NOW ARE THEY?!
I’m not really sure what you and the above asshat’s motivation is, do you think that somehow your intellectual dishonesty will make people think Americans are less stupid on average?
Frankly I don’t even care and I am so fuckdamn tired of your kind.
Please take a step back. You’re getting worked up about a hamburger debate on the Internet.
No I am getting worked up about two people spewing provably wrong bullshit, misleading the entire thread, and getting tons of traction because of it.
We are now reddit 2016 and it’s only getting worse by the hour.
Is A&W a good source on why their huge marketing stunt failed?
It was in newspapers, you can literally search it and read scans of it right now.
Even in the 70s there were people who marveled at how stupid the angry idiots who thought 1/3 was less than 1/4 and you can go back and read those articles and see their own words.
Ooh, I wanna read these.
I am having trouble finding scans, though. Do you have any links?
There is already at least one in the thread and I’m not doing free work for you today.
Do you mean… the snopes article?
Okay.
Yup, A&W sucked because their food sucks. They were great when I was a kid (I loved their frosted rootbeer mugs and onion rings), but they started cutting costs or something because I never went back after the early 2000s or so.
I blame it on this stunt where they merged KFC and A&W, both of which suck.
I used to work on a deli. Someone ordered an eighth pound of meat (which is like nothing and nobody ever did this). My coworker asked me if that meant .8 on the scale.
It depends on how much they’re paying you
That was another point of frustration. People would think if they asked for a half pound and the scale reads .6 they get a deal, but in reality it’s just printing a label that says my pounds and they gotta pay accordingly. Some customers would accuse you of ripping them off if they asked for a specific amount and got that amount exactly.
This is hilarious, I never considered people would actually think like that.
Why would they think you’re weighing it? To see if your judgement of the weight is accurate?
Beats me. It’s not like we were taking money at the deli counter either. Also the labels say how much weight there is, price per pound, and the total price. Just like meat from the meat department would. But I guess because they’re asking for it in person they think it works differently.
That’s ~50g. I wouldn’t think of ordering less than 100g of anything at a deli
(At least people in metric countries hardly need fractions)
Yeah it was a comically tiny amount of meat.
The way he lays out his math had me a little confused at first but I blame it on my lack of coffee
When I was in grade school I remember a teacher told me that if you think about the greater and less than signs as alligators eating the bigger numbers… To this day, it’s still what I see
That’s still how I think about them as well
Huh… I was taught they are 2 lines. There’s a bigger gap on the side which is bigger, and a smaller gap on the side that’s smaller (so small they touch)
But alligators are cool…
My teacher put a kid with dwarfism and tall kid side by side in front of the black board and drew a line between the tops of their heads, and then another still downwards but in the opposite horizontal direction. Thus the pointy end always faces the smaller thing, while the open end always faces the larger thing. Doesn’t work so well in english, though since it kind of implies people with dwarfism are “less than” people without the condition. In the language it was taught the verbs used for < and > are also used when comparing heights.
HUNGRY ALLIGATOR SIGNS for life!
Lord bless whoever came up with that imagery, 3 generations of kids passed algebra because of this.
CHOMP CHOMP
The hungry alligator eats the bigger number.
That always confused me as a kid. Big side is bigger number - simple and straightforward.
It’s a little alligator going towards the big number. Simple and straightforward.
Well, the 1/3 also had to compete with the double-quarter (aka, half pound, but two patties), which is bigger and feels significantly more substantial as well.
It doesn’t help that any place I saw selling them (let’s be real here, this is about McD’s) was offering an expensive and fancy 1/3rd burger (deluxe bacon, southwest ranch style, Asian sensation with real gold flake, etc) against the old reliable (cheap) quarter-pounder. Perceived value is everything.
Also, we’re bad at math, lol
A&W had a 1/3lb burger that was cheaper than McDonald’s quarter pounder. Nothing fancy about it, just people are bad at math.
A&W was such a cool thing before McDonald’s and the other franchises killed them off.
I keep seeing people talking as if they didn’t exist anymore but they still have about 600 restaurants in the US and 400 elsewhere (not counting the Canadian version which is independent and doing very well as far as I know and actually has more locations than the US chain)
There used to be one near me and there isn’t anymore. I really miss the root beer that was on tap there, something they did to it at the restaurant made it special (possibly a different syrup or the way they mixed it).
There’s one like a mile from me, but I never go because they suck. Oh, and KFC sucks as well, yet they decided to co-brand with them.
I liked it as a kid, but I tried them a few years ago and they are awful. I much prefer Carl’s Jr and even Wendy’s.
I only see them as partnerships with other places like KFC. In my childhood there was a bunch of them. I liked them best.
They’re still around in some parts of the country, but quality is not nearly what it was.
Its still around in some places, independent franchises.
It doesn’t take a ton of mental capacity, but even though I have a good education in math, I still find myself doing the heuristics of assuming that larger digits means larger number. Using fractions for comparing sizes can flip these heuristics. And I think a lot of people are like me, and also that they won’t spend a lot of time reading each item on the menu.
Where I’m from, burger sizes are just given in amount of grams, which makes it a lot easier to compare.
Even though fractions makes sense for accuracy in a mathematical point of view, I see no benefit in a practical application.
Fractions are easier to do calculations in your head or on paper than trying to do the same stuff in decimals. E.g. half of 1/2 is 1/4, half of 1/4 is 1/8, half of 1/8 is 1/16, half of 1/16 is 1/32 etc. In decimals this would be 0.5 -> 0.25 -> 0.125 -> 0.0625 -> 0.03125. When building stuff, I find it useful to be able to do that kind of stuff in my head easily.
Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American.
:) I think British woodworkers also use fractional units.
The problem occurs when you have a 1/4 pound burger for $1 and a 1/3 pound burger for $1.25. Is it worth it?
If only using fractions in powers of 2 1/2, I understand that it’s simpler. A carpenter is happy to meassure 3/16s of an inch, since the tools have notches or marks for that. But when you include other fractions, it becomes messy.
How much more is 1/3 than 1/4? Instead of handling digits, you have to find the lowest common denominator to perform the subtraction. I.e. 1/3 - 1/4 = 4/12 - 3/12 = 1/12.
And at this point, I believe the relationship to the units are lost. Do you have any direct sense to what 1/12 of a pound is?
The 1/3 pound burger is (1/3)/(1/4) times the size of the 1/4 pound burger. So the burger is worth it if $1*(1/3)/(1/4) is greater than $1.25. We arrive at $4/3 which we want to compare to $1.25. Now, since we are relating units which use fractions to units where fractions are unusual, we have another problem. (Yes, we can easily see tha 4/3 = 1.333…, but we wanted to use fractions, right?). So to compare the numbers, we can see that 1.25 = 125/100, which we can simplify to 5/4. So in the end we are left with the simple problem of finding which is bigger between 4/3 or 5/4.
To summarize, I agree that fractions are nice when you have them in a vacuum and don’t have to relate them to numbers of other units.
why use decimals when you can use the… you know, actual weight of the thing?
How is saying “this weighs .25 kg“ not using the “actual weight of the thing”?
I get what you mean, but its adding a useless complexity layer.
If the thing always is smaller than, for example, a kilogram, just use the next measurement unit, a gram. 100g, 200g, 500g, etc.
It’s true the other way around, if the thing is always bigger than, for example, a kilogram, use it as is. 1kg, 1.5kg, 4kg, 6.2kg.
For ease of comparison, always use the most significant unit.
heuristics of assuming that larger digits means larger number
That’s not heuristics, it’s mental laziness or smoothbrain. You shouldn’t say you have a good education in math and then say that…
It’s indeed a form of mental laziness because the mind is designed to approach some concepts with a non-perfect optimization. That’s heuristics. Yes, I can very easily see which number is the largest if I put my mind at it. But scanning over a fast food chain-sized menu, seeing numbers for 2, 4, 8, 12 piece nuggets, prices on different items and a 1/3 pound burger next to a 1/4 pound burger, I could easily see my mind skip the math and mess up the size comparrison.
Don’t use language you don’t understand, mate. Heuristic
I’m all up for being corrected if I’m wrong in my laguage somehow, but that article seems to be 100% in line with my understanding. What do you find to be wrong?
Like the article says in the first sentence, heuristics “is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method”. Looking at fractions and assuming that the big number is larger is not a pragmatic method, it’s a completely smoothbrain approach. I can’t even comprehend how you think that’s a good approach to fractions. It’s just flummoxing.
I think we just disagree on the level something has to be to be considered “pragmatic”. Almost all numbers we deal with in a daily basis are not fractions, so it’s very natural to develop a shortcut to quickly look at digits to compare numbers. That is a practical approach.
Now, if you don’t get too stuck on the word “pragmatic” but actually finish the sentence, you might find it to be more applicable.
Or maybe even look at the wikipedia page for heuristics from a psychological perspective:
Yes, I disagree that looking at a fraction and thinking “bigger number = larger number” is heuristic. It’s just really extremely dumb and I can’t even.
That’s it. There’s no argument, although you seem to think there is.
If somebody uses a heuristic that’s flat-out wrong, is it no longer a heuristic?
I believe that’s the jist of it. Heuristic is a way to get a roughly correct answer to a specific problem. If it doesn’t provide a response that stays in the same ballpark of the real solution to the problem it’s not heuristic, it’s just a wrong train of thought.
Interesting.
But we use fractions a ton here in the US. For example, you can buy milk in a half gallon or a gallon. When you measure, you use 1/4 cup or 1/2 cup. In metric, you rarely use fractions and instead just change the unit (e.g. 250ml or 1L).
Since it’s so common here, it’s honestly nuts to me that anyone here would be confused at whether 1/4 lb or 1/3 lb is bigger, because we use fractions so often here. If you’ve ever cooked anything in your life (incl. macaroni and cheese from a box), you’ve dealt with fractions in real life. I probably do more fraction math than decimal math, especially since I buy everything with my credit card, so when I see a decimal, I round it to the nearest convenient fraction (e.g. I bought 4.5lbs of meat recently for a dinner party, and I communicated that as 4 1/2 lbs). If you ask me how many ounces are in a 1/4 cup, I’d have to stop and think. But if you ask me how many 1/4 cups are in a cup, I’d have the answer for you on the spot.
So I could see this happening in areas where fractions aren’t common, but in the US, it’s something everyone deals with, pretty much daily. Oh, btw, we have one of these at my local dump:
)
The third burger failed because it was a stupid amount when it came out, iirc it was more expensive than the quarter lber and like a dollar less than a double quarter lber.
Well yeah, that’s how math should work. It’s more expensive than the thing it’s bigger than, and less expensive than the thing it’s smaller than.
My point was almost everyone would rather spend the extra dollar to get more especially because the double quarter lber came with a larger fry iirc.
They sold different size fries with different burgers? Not just small medium large choice for any burger? I’ve never heard of that
WTF is a, “small” or a “medium” for that matter??
Were you trying to say large, extra large, and super size? /s
Iirc yes, I’m pretty sure the quarter was a medium fry and the double a large.
It failed at more chains than just McDonald’s. Lots of places had 1/3 burger patties only and most have switched to 1/4 and didn’t even alter the price… More profit and they get less headache about it.
Never really saw it anywhere else at least here in the Midwest.
Hardee’s had them in the Southeast.
“lber” is making me irrationally angry.
That’s fair.
made from pure lberian lbex meat
Also a single quarter pound patty plus fries is already enough food. Perhaps too much.
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