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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2954 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I don't think it's brain dead, it just means he doesn't have a reference point to compare to. @Corvos mentioned that would be 1/8 of all people on earth, but if you don't know there are 8 billion people on earth (I certainly didn't), then that doesn't help you as a heuristic. If you don't happen to know any reference point on which to base an estimate, and if you're being asked in a setting where you have to answer off the cuff (which he was, since it was on his show), then your answer isn't going to really have any bearing on how smart (or not) you are.

Yeah. I'm sympathetic to this, but also, you should have some reference points. Surely, a person ought to know the population of their own country, their own country's relative size compared to the world, and then be able to roughly estimate the percentage of people who belong to some minority, and get a rough guess.

I'm not going to fault him for getting it wrong off the cuff. I might make the same mistake, and then feel stupid about it a second later as my brain catches up to my mouth.

But it is important, I think, if a person is going to have opinions about a topic in public, to actually have a handle on the statistics involved. It makes a huge difference if you're talking about 10+% of the world's population vs a fraction of 1%.

He's like 50-60 years old. How do you go through that many years (while not literally living in a cave) without ever hearing about the world's population? If you are off by a billion or two, that's understandable, but you gotta have some idea, especially when you've no doubt heard about the populations of India and China being what they are. You shouldn't miss by full orders of magnitude.

I'm 40 years old and I didn't know. It's not relevant to my life; why would I bother to retain that information?

I vaguely remember people making a big deal about China and India both having more than a billion people, and the US having less than half that, which seems at least a bit grounding, and I don't pay close attention to these things.

Yeah, reference points are hard. I once lost a general knowledge quiz for my team by getting us to the tiebreak and then being asked, “What is the distance between London and the closest point in Canada?”

I thought for a bit, tried to imagine them on a map relative to a journey in the UK I knew and thought, hmm, easily ten times that.

Said, “1200 miles”.

Teammates not best pleased.

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