Why do people keep getting this wrong‽
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
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If there are calculators that cost only $1.50, Bloomberg could have bought every US citicen a calculator. That would have been life changing.
There is a calculator app on (almost) every mobile phones already.
And (almost) everyone in America have one.
That would have been a waste of resources.
(Edit mofowow)
@@Koozomec r/woooosh
or, just buy paper and pen.. cmon, it's just division..
@@buttercroissant9633 you're right.
@@berib3006 I agree.
The worst thing to me is not that they initially got the math wrong, but that they didn’t even question the ridiculous result. They were just like “Yep, must be right.”
Really rich people are like “1 mill?” They dont question that the maths works because 1 million is not a lot to them, only to the average person.
@@vansharora5859 no but the people righting these are probably average so that doesn’t really explain it.
@@dylantryalot6187 The guy that wrote the tweet is verified I think on twitter. Must mean something.
@@vansharora5859 I did a small sample of asking people and I found most people would say in the millions, i just asked them 500 and 250 instead to make it easier for people so I don’t think it has anything to do with the verification but it could Improve the chances of them failing but it still would happen.
Verification is given to anyone with a journalism job. They don't make squat. Almost guaranteed not wealthy by that point. Keep in mind the term 1% denotes rarity.
Bloomberg could have just bought everybody a large soda.
That monster!
... which he made illegal when he was mayor 😂
16 oz only!
Still would have been more useful
NortheastGamer two numba nines, a numba nine large, a numba 6 with extra dip
This reminds me of “People born in 2010 will be 90 in the year 3000.” I wonder why people mess up that one.
Next new year will fall on a friday 13th.
@@kirkanos771 Next new year will start on the 13th /j
9+1 is 10. That means that the next number over needs to go up one. They then skip over the zero since 0 doesn't register as a number to them, so they skip over it and add the 1 to the 2 I'd wager.
They wouldn't make the same mistake in 2110, there they'd realize that the 1 has to be added to the "21".
People born before 2000 are much less likely to make this mistake.
People mess this up because they only interpret the current year as a 2 digit number. The other two digits (20) are just something you always add.
When you force them to roll over their 2 digits they realize they need to do something different and there is a 2 there already, so it must become a 3
Considering that Finland has 5.5 million citizens and this video has been watched 1.1 million times, it's really astounding to think that if only Finnish people watched this video, they all would have watched it 5 million times. Really drives through how popular this guy is.
No they would've watched it 1/5 MiLliOn times
@@nates9778 please... please say sike right now
@@slim4o8z MIllIoNs tO OnE!
1 out of 5 finnish people watched this video once
@@nates9778 that's wrong, not 1/5 Million times, it is just 1/5 time or 20% of the Finnish population watched it once.
The most important instinct you can have is the "Wait, that can't be right." thought.
True
I only have that thought when I repeatedly write the same word and I think it's spelt wrong
@@dooper264 what about if someone asks you if it is spelt or spelled?
@@benholroyd5221 hahaha assome 😂
I don't need that instinct since i can do basic math.
These are the same people that say “I’ll never use math in my life”
Riven Of A Thousand Voices I teach maths and chemistry. It can be pretty depressing when I introduce myself because so many people (at a guess over 90%) I meet respond with “Oh I hate maths” / “I am not good at maths” / “I hated maths when I was in school”.
Luckily most of my students are competent at it, and I’ve had a handful of a very impressive students whom I hope will take higher level maths into their careers.
Steve S damn, sounds rough, math is really great once you understand it
I came to realize after high school that math is one of the most important skills used throughout our lives. A vast majority of jobs will need its employees to rely on some type of math.
And they never have
It would be funnier as "I'll 100% never use math in my life!"
On the other hand, if we assume the maths is correct, then that means Bloomberg could just give all that money to himself and keep repeating the process, and crash the US economy over night with infinite money, which I think is way more impressive
*overnight
*impressive.
@@alvallac2171 oberneighte*
eempleziv*
@@RegularRhombicDodecahedron sorry, USAian is not my onest speaks
Pretty sure giving each US citizen 1 million dollars would crash the US economy over night
I thought the video was going to be about inflation
Counterpoint: if you can keep 30 million sheep safe and kept track of, your sheep keeping abilities are unparalleled.
Losing 50 million sheep is a statistic, keeping 30 million sheep is an accomplishment.
Further point: if you can procure 80 million sheep in the first place, you are likely already a god, or wealthy enough to pretend to be one anyway
Most of the sheep died in the war anyway
@@MarmaladePlan3t you mean the sheep war of 8/25/2022?
I laughed so much i nearly choked on my food
“Bloomberg spent 500 million dollars on Ads
He could have given 1 million dollars to each person”
I got tricked.
It made me think that there were 327 people in the USA.
I'll admit I don't know more than 327 people so as far as I know it's totally plausible
You caught us.
Maybe they have 327 people in the US that can actually do math. ;-)
I haven’t met more that 327 people from the US so I think this could be true 👀
They mistook the USA for Wyoming
Look if 80 million sheep just showed up on my lawn one day and I managed to keep hold of 30 million of them, I would be pretty happy about my sheparding prowess.
What lawn ??? Lots sheep sh...
mazdaman wtf did you say?
the country would either drown in inflation or shut down like Margathea
80 Million Sheep - your lawn would be ruined for years, if not generations.
@@sidrat2009 Years? Try minutes.
I remember times in physics where it was exciting to cross out factors in divisions.
When you put the 500 million / 327 million , my brain instantly went: cross out all the letters !!
(1 billion)/(1 million) = 1b/m
sin(x)/cos(x)=in/co. No kidding some kids did this.
@@blakecook9266 this made me laugh way too much. I'm very glad to know that one 'bee per em' is aroundabout a thousand
@@leave-a-comment-at-the-door*thousand
@@Feorr001 (d/dx) sin(x) = sin(x)/x
A farmer once asked me if I could round up his 297 sheep for him, I said sure.. three hundred
Round up to nearest 1000
* Z E R O *
@@insightfultoaster2965 what you said would be correct if you said round 'off', and not 'up'. Round up would mean you always ceiling the value and not optionally floor it to a closer value. :)
@@rajdeepbiswas8912 Or how about simply "round to nearest 1000". That way you don't have the "off" to make it sound "stronger".
@@rajdeepbiswas8912 Oops my bad.
@@insightfultoaster2965 it was still funny
Matt: we consider “million sheep” the unit
Me, an intellectual: Megasheep
When I hear something like "million kilometers" I cringe and wish people would understand how prefixes work. (That's a gigameter.) Similarly for kilograms. Or cubic meters - there's already a unit for volume.
REeeeeeeeEEEEeeee metric ReeeEEEeeee
@@brian554xx, stop trying to make metric prefixes happen, it's not going to happen.
but if we're dividing, wouldn't they cancel out the million sheep and leave us with just one over Mega?
@@brian554xx The thing is: those are not very intuitive to work with. We are so used to kilometers and kilograms and such in daily life, because they are easily imaginable units. For example, when you say 1000 kilograms I immediately know how much that is (roughly), but if you'd say 1 megagram I'd have to think really hard about it, even though it technically makes more sense.
By that logic, you only need 7.5 billion dollars to solve the entirety of every country's poverty.
Hey, you never know, if someone figured out how to spend it correctly, it might be enough!
That maths is still 100% stupid bullshit though.
Holy crap you could give everyone a BILLION dollars~!!!
@@EGarrett01 exactly! What a waste that bill gates instead puts it into malaria prevention, so inefficient!
@@shadowfax333 The U.S. Congress seems to think a one time payout would be enough.
However, nobody would do it because he wouldn't have any money left over - like Bloomberg.
I had a similar conversation with a coworker when the US lottery was over $1 billion. He was why don't they spilt the money to every citizen? I was quick to point out that would only be about $3 per person.
And the actual cash amount of the jackpot would have been less than half that, just as today's Powerball jackpot is advertised as $1.4 billion but with a cash value of only $640 million (before taxes.)
@@iy42 I know about the taxes my point was even without taxes it would be a small amount. even this weekend's prize, $1,400,000,000 / 340,000,000 = $4.12
I bet everyone cheered and bought you a drink after that
@@LaVaZ000 its really not an unrealistic story though
Like at all
That one actually makes way more sense though.
Without a set of zeros to help visualise: the difference between "a hundred million" and "a billion" can very easily feel a *lot* bigger then it actually is; especially since I wouldn't put it past a lot of people to intrinsically think that a 'billion' is actually 'a million million' considering the fact that 'million' is just 'a thousand thousand'.
So I can't blame someone that might think that way; it's an honest mistake. Dividing millions by each other and **Still* getting millions is a different story however.
The fact that there's a political tone to the tweet and meme also means that confirmation biases are preventing people from actually thinking things through.
absolutely. this person is not bad at math like they claim. if they were handed a problem in a book like "what is 500,000,000 / 300,000,000?", im sure they would figure it out, even if they were bored the whole time.
but that's not how this problem took form in their head.
Yep. No matter if it's fundamentally wrong, people would swallow any stupid information that "confirms" their beliefs because they're THAT desperate to be right.
The force of Marx Ruttin prime minister of the Netherlands is strong in this one!
Bias might be a factor, but it might not. They could just be bad at arithmetic, and nothing more. That someone has a set of political convictions about a matter doesn't prevent him from being objective about it.
IDK, I'm a Conservative who wouldn't vote for Bloomberg EVEN if he DID give me a million bucks, but I spotted the flaw right away. I have seen this same error made on non political subjects over and over. When numbers are "big", people's brains fart. When I see "millions","billions" ETC, I just lop off those words, and deal with the digits. Scientific notation exists to deal with all the needless "words".
I can understand someone making this kind of mistake on a tweet or something like that. But the TV presenters after the fact still commenting on how "true" it is, that's truly disturbing.
Yep....
@@RahimRahmat How so? He literally explained it. The tweet person could have done the math. No time limits. The TV presenters are being told exactly what to say in a very fast paced environment
Welcome to America
@@Mswordx23 I guess it mist be how americans are thought in school.
I have never thought millions as being a unit. My school education did not wire my brain in so twisted way.
@@sowianskizonierz2693 Believe it or not people don't usually fact check their tweets and, unless they're some kind of prominent figure like a politician or a scientist, we usually don't expect them to. It's still the same mistake, but it's a little more understandable and considerably less reprehensible to make that kind of mistake in a tweet that the writer of which probably didn't really think twice about.
However we should be able to expect better from a massive news corporation like MSNBC that is literally broadcasting to millions, and who many take at their word regardless of what they actually claim. MSNBC making the same mistake on their program shows how little afterthought goes into what they report as facts, and apparently it's the same amount of thought that goes into a random Twitter user writing a tweet on the toilet. Which is essentially none at all.
When people hear what they want to hear, they stop thinking
When people hear what they don't want to hear, they stop listening.
@@sleeptyper ooooh very good response!
@@sleeptyper When people think they hear, they don't pay enough attention to understand if they heard or not, and almost nobody bothers to listen.
This
But there is a stupid amount of money involved in politics. The fact that sharing 500 million of it with everyone in america would amount to 1 dollar 50 cents for each person instead of 1.5 million doesn't change that fact.
Sharing those 500 million with every single homeless person in america means you can pay 1 month of rent for every single one of them. Hell, you could pay multiple months if for every house/appartment rented in this, housed more 1 one person.
This is a great explanation for how people get these kinds of problems wrong.
I think that people are willing to accept the absurd result mainly because it has to do with politics, which as we all know is a very emotionally charged topic.
On top of that you have to take into account some people who are aware of this kind of mistake and will intentionally do it for political gain.
The first two examples he picked were against Democrat people or policies. Those Republicans are either bad at math or they did it intentionally for political reasons knowing that their base wouldn't questions the ludicrous claims.
I would be interested to see all the data for exactly which side makes more of these 'mistakes'.
@@Subjagator"which of these sides" This is exactly what's wrong with American politics. Nobody wants to do what's best for Americans; they want to do what's best for their "team".
thats because they believe their team is doing whats best for america though@@SpazzMatticusTheGreat
@@SpazzMatticusTheGreatDemocrats are communist treasonous traitors! What can't you understand about that?🤦🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️👋🏿
@@Subjagator You realize both Democrats and Republicans do this, right? It seems like you're just picking one side on this discussion
"It is an incredible way to put it." Yes, incredible, meaning not-credible.
It's truly unbelievable
Fantastic, even.
uncredible?
Steve Spivey In fairness, Brian Williams’ calculator was destroyed by an RPG
Lmao
Whats even more disturbing is how people believe if you gave everyone a million dollars, everyone could still live like millionaires.
The sooner you get rid of it the better off you will be! (presuming that you exchange the money for assets of some kind lol)
That was my first thought
Theres only so many private islands and apples in the grocery stores. Giving people more money doesnt change the fact there are limited resources.
@@pluto8404 You are looking at it the wrong way. You are seeing limited resources, and probably see economics as a zero-sum game. This is a little more complex than people think it is.
Where did the money come from? Was it printed? If you print enough to double the money supply, you just cut the value of that money in half. If it was taken from somebody else, they lost that money, so it retains its value. Although they now are reluctant to produce more wealth assuming that will also be taken away.
But if everyone sees it as a one-time thing to take the money and give it to another person, then most people will simply spend it all.
We already have a history of this with lotteries. Winning the lottery doubles your chances of declaring bankruptcy. Most people are back to where they started, or even worse off after 7 years on average.
The idea of limited resources is quite misunderstood. The sun only has about 4 billion years worth of fuel left before it runs out. That is a limited resource. But there's no chance it's running out in our lifetime, nor the lifetime of our Great⁵⁰⁰ grandchildren's lifetime.
We can grow more apples. Dubai is making more islands. Also how far do you think $1,000,000 goes?
@@VIKDR1 Private islands are definitely very close to zero sum. You are correct about apples though.
Bottom line: People are not as stupid as you think. They are even more stupid than you think...
Think of how smart the average person is. Now imagine half the population is dumber than that.
Well it was on the internet...and the internet is soylent green goodness.
IQ tests measure the Intelligence of someone who is trying their best to get max score. But throughout the day this is not the case, we operate at a much lower IQ to save energy.
One proof of that is drivers decision making skills during car transit, if you were to measure their IQ then you’d find people operate at the IQ level of a reptile at best.
@@dogzer That is personal choice and not all of us are like that. People aren't as stupid as Carlin or the rest of the comments make them out to be. They are lazy, because of the same idea that you mentioned. Laziness means that they don't want to expend the energy to think, not that they cannot. I eat far more than I should yet I am nowhere near as obese (about 55lbs overweight) as a large portion of the population. I'm also fairly indolent; I don't get out much and have spent far too much time sitting down and far too much time not getting sufficient exercise. The reason I'm not 500lbs by now is that I choose to think despite it costing me energy. Oddly enough, if you ask people that weigh even more than I do what they eat, you'll find they don't eat near as much as I do. Yet they're still fatter than me and some do more exercise than I do much more often. Why is this? A combination of what's eaten and how they spend their consumed calories. What I'm saying might make more sense to you if you realize that the human brain uses about 30% of the energy available to the human body. One 3lb organ that doesn't move inside its case uses 1/3 of all the energy available to the body.
As I said, people aren't 'stupid' as such, just lazy. They are, however unwise in their choices far too often. As my mother often said to me, "hesitation plus the passage of time results in a decision" whether you gave it any thought or not. And often folks just make a decision without thinking. Which is also unwise unless the decision and near all of its parameters were previously considered and the decision made in advance. This is a fine way to work, but isn't always possible because things change. The changed parameters should be considered before a decision is made, but making decisions ahead of time can speed up the decision-making process because one only needs to consider the changed parameters as a pre-made decision has already considered the other parameters of a decision. It won't mean you don't reconsider most if not all the parameters of a decision, but the time spent will be reduced because of the time already spent thinking on them. Of course, sometimes a snap judgment is often the correct one and too much thought is only a way to put off the decision.
Also. Not all people are necessarily trying their best to get the max score on an IQ test. There may be situations for some people that would cause them to choose to get by with an IQ that they choose rather than one that will mean something to others that they don't want to be defined by--resulting in them choosing to not try too hard and perhaps purposely get some answers incorrect.
"Stupider as a fox!" - Homer Simpson
The ol’ “which is heavier,10 tons of bricks or ten tons of feathers” grammar related logistical blind spot
There's five people at the party and we bought seven beers. We could have just given everyone a million beers and still have beer left over.
Just like jesus
Makes sense
@@madjoemak no the jesus one is different, they have 0 wine and 12 prople.
It frustrates me that I can't seem to make the connection.
@@festethephule7553 what do you mean? He's saying that if $500,000,000 ÷ $300,000,000 = $1,000,000+ then that means 7 ÷ 5 is also over a million.
You can still treat the "million" as a unit. Just remember that in division, units cancel. High school physics gave me the habit and intuition to do this.
Yep. X [mln * $] / Y [mln * 웃] is X/Y [$/웃].
so $500m / 327m people = $1.53/person
Well yeah, the mole is a unit after all and that's just Avogadro's number of molecules.
All I'm saying is: it's a good thing they don't measure alcohol by molar fraction or someone will accidentally end up accidentally drinking Avogadro's number of glasses of wine.
You can cancel all kinds of units
20ft/lbs ÷2ft is 10lbs
100mph ×10hr is 1000mi
etc.
I use this kind of math constantly, idk how people survive without it
Edit: fixed example
Dylan Ogden glad to hear that it's not totally useless
12 minutes of this guy explaining why people are not idiots, but just stupid. Thank you.
You mean some of us are human ?? I am shocked !
@@richardalderman1324 Americans aren't the brightest humans
@@amineabdz humans aren't the bright humans.
like you.
amine abdz Irony..
@@richardalderman1324 it's human to be dumber than a sack of hammers? No wonder I have nothing but contempt for my fellow man.
"Don't tell us if you're ahead on the math" takes me out every time!😂
When I was in college, the only curriculum not requiring a single math course was journalism. Anytime I met someone in journalism, I immediately said, "so you don't like math". They usually confirmed the only reason they were in journalism was due to the zero math requirement. Your clip is a perfect example of why journalists should have some math. :) great video!!
Oh that's actually such great insight to have!
The thing is, though, this wasn't caused by a lack of math education. Nobody was requiring that the anchor do calculus. Nobody was asking that he do trigonometry. Nobody was asking that he even simplify a square root. The only thing he had to do was long division: literally third-grade math.
Fundamentally, this journalist wasn't bad at math; he was bad at journalism. He let his preconceptions short-circuit his critical thinking.
still Journalism should have a course in statistics(if they havent) which is basically still math since they deal with it a lot.
@@mvmlego1212 Studying math more in depth develops a sense for numbers that helps even with more trivial things like this one. I definitely think it would help. Also, well, obviously having journalists study statistics would be immensely helpful.
@@Miju001 -- I agree that journalists would benefit from a statistics course or two, but I still disagree that his mistake should be characterized as a lack of education for two reasons.
First, it's not knowledge of complicated mathematical concepts that make people better at arithmetic; practicing arithmetic makes people better at arithmetic, and _everybody_ semi-regularly encounters situations in which arithmetic would be useful.
Second, I still believe that if he encountered the same division problem while covering any non-political subject, he would have seen the problem almost immediately, or at least by the time the segment aired.
My head doesn't hurt from doing the math. My head hurts from the social implications of what I just heard...
If knowledge is the currency of democracy and this is the level of knowlege available to the american pubilc then i guess it's fair to say that democracy is bankrupt. What a sad state of affairs.
@@lostandlonely2112 It's a republic, not a democracy or at least it's suppose to be.
@@candidcomments292 Techincally, we are a "democratic republic" but there isn't much reason to say that over "we are a republic." Its not wrong to say either, I guess, but saying we're a republic is infinitely closer.
Now imagine, people like this are responsible for our future...
I wasn't religious up until now but may god have mercy on us
@@chas1878 It's not all bad. While these people may not be able to do arithmetic they probably have many other skills you and I don't that enable them to be good at their job
this isnt even just a math issue, I dont understand how an adult human could hear that statement and think that sounds remotely possible
And yet my Facebook feed is filled with stupid BS like this.
Literally just used the wrong equation. They thought of it as 500 MINUS 327, which would mean bloomberg would have $173 Million left. They just used the wrong math.
@@Araseth but think logically. if Mike bloomberg was rich enough to do this, somebody richer would already have done it bc giving everyone a million dollars would solve so many problems. it logicall makes no sense
@@Araseth it's American math
@@bigmango202 yes and believe me I know our school system has failed us on multiple levels.
i now understand why they always drilled in our head to read the questions well in school. and to take your time. otherwise mistakes like this would never be so common
But… they did do that, and mistakes like this are so common…
That doesn't fix stupid
I can understand how someone makes this mistake. I will never understand how they don’t think to double-check before saying it.
They deleted it within an hour of posting it, but it was too late. It was a stupid tweet, but they got stalked, harassed and abused online and in person for months because of it.
It's quite interesting, because if you were to say I've got £5 and 10 friends, not a single soul will say: so you can give each friend £5. That would never happen.
But stick a million to each number and the brain goes:"uuuuuhhhh"
@@gold6603 Good. Maybe he will think twice next time before spreading stupidity online.
I don't understand it myself. "He spent 500 million dollars and there's 327 million people so he can..."
Give 500 million dollars to 327 million people? Divide out the million... 500 dollars to 327 people?
"So where's that million? Since I don't know, he must have given it to each person."
I'll rephrase it, the millions cancel each other out if you're solving the problems for one person.
@@n16161 oh yeah making an honest mistake warrants the internet to attack you, i forgot how we punish people
Paraphrasing here: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
You can teach away incompetence, you cannot teach away laziness.
nobody is actively evil, we just don't care enough to stop ourselves from being assholes. but yes, people are more likely to be stupid and incapable of basic math, than we are to be actually malevolent.
sure but the problem is that the msnbc's entire staff is either idiotic brainwashed and well insane.... or malicious spreading bullshit and conspiracy theories simply becuse they don't like our so "horrible" OrangeManBad president/money/...
it begs the question: are they being evil because of stupidity, or are they being stupidly evil?
@donotlike 4 anonymus Do you even realise who they were talking about? They were talking about Michael Bloomberg and his Democratic primary campaign, not Trump. Seriously, you can't talk about others being idiots when you don't even understand who or what they're talking about
Facts
You know what I'm ashamed about? That when I read the first two lines, I thought, "well that's about $1.5, right?"
And then the tweet went on to call it a million and I *instantly believed that instead*. I'm so gullible.
Are you a Conservative by any chance?
@@andrewince8824 what's that supposed to mean
@@andrewince8824 but it was liberal MSNBC that aired it....I'm confused on your point.
Lol me too ..
Lol @ it being conservatives who are so bad at math that they think there's enough money to give everything for free.
There's only $21 trillion in the entire world, but Democrats keep proposing plans that cost more than that
Worst display of maths I've ever seen is at a shop when one worker said they are fining us 1 pound for every minute we r late and the other said: "So if we are an hour late we lose £100." None of them even realised the mistake and just moved on whilst I was there thinking wth have I just witnessed
Sad
What's the mistake?
It's about £100 when you round it.
@@IamGrimalkinwhy would you round 60 to 100? those numbers are way to small to justify rounding, and in context, rounding by 2/3rds if the original number is just way too much. you wouldn't tell you boss you took $100 on a purchase of $59.99, you would say I took $60.00 because on that scale you would round to the nearest ten at most.
@@logandarnell8946
Because it's all you need to illustrate it's a lot of money.
You round to the accuracy that's relevant to the situation, in this case rounding £60 to £100 is perfectly appropriate.
The exact amount isn't really going to change your willingness to be late by much.
Obviously when you're doing expenses for work a higher level of accuracy is more appropriate.
And you were ok with this?
To be fair, I'd still have happily taken $1.50 if it meant not having to watch Bloomberg's ads every 5 minutes.
lmao XD
Same
Getting paid a free coke for not watching an ad? Great deal 😸 One should have a whole job like this 💰
@Maiahi bet you dont
@Maiahi if you can get on a national ticket ill be shocked
The fact that the tweet made it on a large news station without anyone questioning it is insane.
That's MSNBC for you, lol. I can't believe the news anchor said that without questioning it.
@@nickwilson3499 I guess it would be somewhat plausible that the news anchor didn’t realize it in the moment, so I find it even more crazy that the story passed through multiple people who are in charge of planning the stories on the news.
@@Chevsilverado I think you hit the nail on the head there. I'm a mathematician that's competed in math competitions and stuff, and I know I totally could have made the same error under that sort of stress - at least I could have to begin with, but then a bell really rings and says "wait that really doesn't sound right at all". I have no idea how it made it there, and it also shows how much critical thinking these news presenters employ in their work.
When one is busy feeling self-righteous and making sure everyone knows precisely how morally perfect one is, one simply doesn't have time for things like making sure the arithmetic one's moral argument hinges on isn't off by some trivial margin, like six orders of magnitude. One has virtues to signal.
@@Marmocet It's a blind spot in quick calculations. By making it political you're doing what you're accusing other people of doing.
I got the maximum score on my math SATs, and I still didn't immediately detect what was wrong with the tweet. I'll admit it. A million per person in the US seemed *wrong*, but I didn't spot the obvious error in arithmatic.
Having watched Tom Scott’s latest all I can think of was “is that truly transformative? Or is it criticism and review?”
No copyright infringement intended*
Same here :D
Doesn't fair use include education?
He’s explaining what is wrong, and giving a hypothesis for why people make these kinds of mistakes. I would argue this video qualifies as criticism and review, as well as education.
Hey, I was just watching that! So, way else have you just been watching that was good?
It's a relief to understand the units explanation you gave for this mistake. It's a mistake I can easily imagine myself making on a more complex or abstract problem. But it still blows my mind that people fall for something as obviously wrong as this particular one.
The most important math skill I was ever taught was the "insanity test". You do the math & get your answer. Then before committing to that answer you look back at the original problem, compare it to your answer, and ask yourself "Is this answer insane?"
If it is, you probably messed up somewhere.
You're right, but our economy arguably is approaching insanity, and if you find the answer to any question about wealth "insane," chances are it's not the wrong answer.
@@stickyfox That's not what the test is about. 'Insanity' in this instance is if your question is "What is the area under this curve?" & your answer is "-408,321 m^2" you messed up.
Our economy is just doing what capitalist economies do, & it's producing fascism because that's what liberal capitalism does when it's in trouble. Fascists kill threats to the capitalist class because they are the antibodies of liberalism.
im willing to bet someone referred to this as a "sanity check" within earshot of you and you just misheard it, because that's what it's generally called.
One time I got an answer that was insane but I still got full marks. I had to design a simple room (basically just a box with a door and a window) and calculate how much energy was lost as heat escaping. Apparently that tiny little room lost more energy than my local power station can produce.
Apparently some people haven’t learned this
That's genuinely as sad as A&W's third pounder didn't sell well because americans thought it was smaller than a quarter pounder.
They learned from their mistakes and yet they missed a golden opportunity to bring the fifth pounder on the market for "less than a quarter pounder".
Joost Mehrtens that’s exactly what I was thinking when my dad told me that, and wondered why they didn’t make this.
Oh yes, the 'ol 4/12 pounder. :P
(I guess that probably wouldn't work either. Maybe the "quarter pounder plus 33% extra".)
Sure, 3 is smaller than 4, so 1/3 lb must be less than 1/4 lb. Lots of people didn't wanna learn fractions. 🤣
Wireball at first I thought you where joking because it looks like 4/12 is waaay smaller than 1/3 😂😂😂
It transpires thusly:
Student: “I’m terrible at math.”
Counselor: “Perhaps you should major in journalism.”
I mean I passed calc 1 but got caught off guard by this. What should I major in if I have a short attention span?
I am graduating in physics (I am not from the US) and didn't notice this. Like, it's very easy not see that, because every brain tend to be lazy and take shortcut in reasoning. So if you think that's not necessary to do somenthing your brain will not do it.
@@deoxal7947
Journalism should be ruled out, but there's always political pundit and talk radio.
@@DarkHunter047 Not if you remotely think about orders of magnitude. The GDP of america is like 60000 dollars per capita so hearing a million dollars per person is a ridiculous statement regardless of whether the math trips you up.
@@vaughnblakely7595 exactly. Your understanding of American society is really twisted if you don't instantly see that 1 million dollar per American is way off. The wealth gap is big, but not that big and it is scary that journalists don't know how big it is.
Imagine the people making these mistakes were actually given these amounts of money by the companies, and were told, "Here, give everyone you meet a million bucks", only to realize their mistakes not long after
You mean like the king in the story (puzzle) who was impressed by the inventor of chess who asked what he wanted and was told 1grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, etc, doubling the number on each square?
Imagine spending most of your life studying maths and appreciate its beauty... and then having to explain something like this to people
It's disturbing, indeed :D
On the bright side, Matt Parker would only have to deal with this nonsense when talking about Americans.
I tutored bad math students one summer. They said I was so patient. It was an act. In my mind I was smashing my forehead on the desk.
I was a math undergrad and I didn't spot it. I keep saying this: I thought 1 million per person couldn't possibly be right, but my first thought was that they had their facts wrong: I missed the "obvious" arithmetic slip-up.
A four-year-old is more likely to get this right than someone who can square any number in less than five seconds. This whole thing has turned into an example of 1) Some people will jump on any reason to feel superior and 2) Some people will politicize virtually everything.
@@jessejordache1869I think you’re equating missing the mistake with making it. Also a math Bachelors here, I don’t think a single person in my major would’ve made this mistake, no matter how out of it they were.
Not thinking to check if other people made this mistake though, 100% can see any and all of em do (including myself). Though I’ve slowly learned to check everything.
“Don’t trust any statistic you didn’t fake yourself”
While it may be understandable how the mistake went unnoticed, it's utterly frustrating to see this kind of nonsense being spread through live television, thereby influencing the average american that will not do the math themselves.
Thanks for continuing your videos Matt, it's exactly this type of online content that I look forward to in these days of isolation.
They have always tried to sway the voters. On every side.
Yeah, I completely agree. I'm currently an engineering student, so one thing I've been learning recently is that most people (me included) have a pretty bad intuitive grasp on orders of magnitude -- that intuitive sense must be learned. So, in that sense, I do kind of sympathise with the error. But, you know what else you learn as an engineer? You freaking double check everything all the time. Not doing that is how disasters happen. So, seeing people not do even the most basic level of double checking is honestly pretty upsetting..
Yes, I guess the error is when we place the blame on the presenter of the show which is so easy to do because they're the fool we see saying it on live TV, but really we know that behind the scenes there were unseen people who didn't have that pressure and could have taken the few seconds it would have taken to figure this out.
"will not do the math themselves" .. you make it sound like there's math to consciously do. Anyone who passed 3rd grade should be able to instinctively tell that the tweet is moronic, by the time they reach the "1 million per person" part. People working a real job at a real news station can't all be that stupid. Next thing you're gonna tell me they can't wipe their own butt. They just *obviously* and *deliberately* didn't correct it, on the off change that a few idiots were convinced.
(( *IC* )BlindMan + DeafGuy)/Trump = *America*
Who hears "could have given every citizen $1 million" and DOESN'T think, "that seems implausible". Never mind the maths, I think the issue is people not applying even the most basic criticism to outlandish claims. Or fundamentally not understanding orders of magnitude... if you had 5 apples and 327 million people, who says "so I could give everyone an apple and still have 1½ left"?
326,999,995 don't have an apple is a mouthful to say.
I think the problem comes when you're dealing with large numbers, such as million. Comparing one and a million is the same as comparing a million and a -billion- trillion, but the second one doesn't seem that big of a difference at first glance. I mean, they are both very big numbers, right?
EDIT: milliards are not a thing anymore in English, my bad.
Knedl actually, it depends on how you compare them, if you compare them logarithmically then the difference between 1mil and 1bil is smaller than the difference between 1 and 1mil. If you compare them linearly it’s the other way around. It’s literally never the same difference.
I agree, but I also think that, in this case? It really isnt the "most basic criticism." People like Mike Bloomberg are wealthy on a scale most folks can't comprehend, so when it comes to a claim like "could give every person in the US a million bucks" it really doesn't seem impossible.
Sadly, as was made evidenced in the intial case here, many "reporters" do exactly this. That is why obtaining data from multiple sources (ideally sources not all tied to the same thinktanks like mainstream media) is best before believing most claims. Easy to say, harder to do, I know - I've been guilty of this as well - but it is still important to be said.
I realized you are completely right with the "losing the millions part" is the problem. I realized I have done both. I understand fully well that I need to divide the whole thing. However, I think Veritasium actually touched on this topic slightly with the two person in your head idea. One who answers quick questions, and the one who actually thinks about a problem.
Oh, and I haven't done this enough in my life to have been conditioned to not make that mistake.
I love how he isn't making a huge fun of the people but showing patience and an understanding attitude. I think that if more people and teachers have this attitude, people wouldn't give up on maths as quickly. (Y)
@@notnoaintno5134 Why, some people aren't good at Maths, some aren't good at art or writing or woodworking or anything you can think of... why make fun of people for any of that?
Teachers having this attitude is why people can get away with continuing to be stupid without being properly challenged.
@@ActuallyDoubleGuitars This isn't "not good at Maths". This is "failing hilariously at an incredibly simple thing".
People who need that sort of "patience and understanding" have already given up on maths.
@@ActuallyDoubleGuitars You learn simple division and fractions in primary school. These guys live in one of the most privileged places in the world, yet can't do basic arithmetic. Of course we're gonna make fun of them.
I hate it when i get $327 trillion confused with $500 million
What about the lunch money?
@@o.sunsfamily $327 trillion and 10 bucks
With those large numbers I wonder how other languages express them.
In germany it's Million(10^6), Milliarde(10^9),Billion(10^12),Billiarde(10^15) and so on.
I know that in english it's million billion trillion. Well scratch that, I just looked it up on wikipedia for english, technically those are short scale naming conventions,
there also exist long scale names in "Western, Central Europe, older British, and French Canadian".
It's still interesting, I wonder if that exists commonly across all languages.
@@WuxianTec as a french canadian i can tell you the long scale naming isnt taught to us in school either anymore, i learned about it on youtube cause that's how my dad would count xD
You mean we can all have a TRILLION dollars?! :-)
My high school Physics teacher told us: "Always contemplate the sensibility of your answer". Great Advice.
"Does it make sense?!"
I do this 0.5 seconds after saying/tweeting it out loud, or spend painfully long thinking about every aspect before answering.
Odd advice from a physics teacher given that your senses are the least reliable guide to "what is actually happening" in the universe. Typically, your senses provide an avenue for bias that is not compatible with the scientific method.
@@propsguy007 Sensibility isnt about using your 5 senses, sensibility in this case just means make sure that you're in the right order of magnitude(and isnt obviously inaccurate). They probably dont tell you that in higher level or more obscure physics.
8 apples divided by 3 dogs = 7 bananas per rocket
There isn't one but actually three mistakes in the tweet:
1. The maths as discussed in the video
2. If you give everyone a million dollars, it wouldn't really change anything economically, because suddenly a million dollars has a lot less value
3. The money spent isn't "lost" but rather went into the economy which has some good effects as well
The economy can't run on only services. We would starve pretty quick if we spent our Trillions of GDP on ads. Spending for the sake of spending is a mistake.
What was lost wasn't the money but rather $500m worth of labor. That is about 250 lifetimes of work spent to play videos on screens. Essentially, the amount of labor spent on these ads killed 250 adults just as they entered the workforce. I would rather have them grow corn.
The fact that the news channel didn't even try to FACT CHECK THE TWEET.
It almost sounds like you're still surprised by that.
I mean, do we need fact checking? If someone says "the sky is green" we don't need a fact checker to verify it. We need a primary school education.
The dedicated fact checkers will verify that Trump's claim of ordering Wendy's hamburgers a thousand feet high on Christmas is not accurate (yes a network actually "debunked" a pretty obvious case of hyperbole) but they won't suspect anything about a random person's tweet that didn't provide any sources.
@@m00n1 Yes
The news isn't Bloomberg's budget, the news is the tweet (and the *brilliance* of the perspective its author is offering everyone)
The fact that the news-people found their calculation "disturbing" should have alerted them to their error. If a result sounds outrageous it probably is. Unfortunately, outrageous sensationalism ( what was described on-air as "TRUTH" ) is what drives the news.
The fact that he could have made hundreds of people millionaires but chose to instead use it to force us all to pay attention to him for a month or two is fairly disturbing but still accurate.
But why would he make random people millionaires? That’s incredibly silly.
There’s also the fact if you give everyone $1000000 then you just cause the dollar to be worth less and it doesn’t make everyone rich
How so? That might apply for printing money, but he's already got those dollars.
Often true, but Bloomberg's net worth (as with any billionaire) is in fact outrageous and it's not difficult to see that by e.g. to-scale comparisons. This particular one was wrong, but that's mostly because the $300M he spent on ads was only about one two-hundredth (rounding to one significant figure) of his money.
I think it's the "million" part that confuses people, a million being pretty abstract and unintuitive to handle. There is one very acute comment here stating something about using "hundred" instead of "million".
"I spent $500. There are 327 people. So instead I could have given every person $100 and still have some left" will be recognized as wrong immediately.
This was embarrassingly the only way I was able to recognize the issue lol when he was explaining the units problem, I remember thinking, “Well I have no issues with working out the units. My problem is the equation in general. I’m doing something wrong before I even do the math in my head.” And that something wrong was just subtracting 327 million from 500 million, counting each person as $1 million. But the issue is that that equation only accounts for 327 people, not 327 million people lol
@@PtylerBeats exactly. The problem here is that the word “million” is being considered as a unit like cm, in, ml rather than a value “x,000,000” like it should be.
@@zekorei9321 The problem is one million dollars are being treated as the same unit as one million humans.
@@zekorei9321 That still doesn't make sense, though. Units cancel out when divided.
@@PtylerBeats If you won $500 million dollars, how many people could you give a million dollars to, before you ran out of money?
That's how it made sense to me, at least.
It's very hard to get a math problem right when your agenda depends on getting it wrong.
Damn good quote! Deserves exponentially more likes!
American politics in a nutshell lmao
@@ademarmatinian3557 It's a pretty surface level political observation tbh, and it ignores the fact that it **isn't** just political bias that's causing people to make the mistake - that's the point of the video
"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
*median person seems better 😉
“Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.” ~ George Carlin
I don't consider myself to be a smart person but even I caught that one after finishing reading that tweet. If the majority of people are dumber than me, then the world really is in some serious trouble.
This is not entirely true, 99.9999% can be stupider than the average.
The average is a terrible way of using statistics.
Like for example, around like 99.98% or so have a above average amount of arms, but that just comes from the fact that most people were born with and still have 2 arms.
The same can work the other way around, if 99.99...% are as stupid as a rock and 2 people have a functioning brain, then 2 people are above average and 99.999...% below.
Not to disagree with your point, just saying that more than 50% of people are stupid and you can claim it without actually being technically wrong.
@@5GTower1000Percent i thought I would be first one to point it out. But in a way you are also wrong, it also need not to be more than 50%. It could be less than
I could buy a package of M&Ms from a vending machine and have about 20 cents left over...That sure as hell would be life changing right now. Do not underestimate the power of chocolate...
Amen 🙏
I doubt it they probably like 1.25 do you would still just have enough with about a quarter left over. Best m&m ever.
It helps... it really does.
Oh Matt, Matt, Matt. "Million" is just something we say after numbers to make them sound more impressive.
I was on a school lecture/meeting among parents and one of them asked why the kids had to learn things they never use like trigonometry. Just minutes before a student said "history oscillates back and forth like a parabola". Math teaches us - above all - to think. Your point about going beyond our natural abilities is great!!!! Applauses!!!
Oh, in college I had classes (calculus) with an Ethno-mathematician who studied ... well ... how different groups and cultures do math. He studied from the large indigenous groups like the Xavantes (Brazil) to kids who sell goods in the streets of Salvador, Bahia. It's a very interesting field.
Wouldnt they mean "pendulum" and not "parabola"? It feels more like a word stumble, then a genuine misunderstanding of a math
@@Maniac_l23 Nope, it is a parabola. All history is a constant up and down.
Empires(for simplicity) start small, rise in power, and then collapse, and then the next empire repeats the process.
@@chrisbaker8533 so then... a sine wave?? good sir, a parabola extends infinitely and does not repeat itself
@@thatartistuknow Sure, if you don't understand and misapply those concepts.
A parabola is only infinite and doesn't repeat in theory, not in practical application
Draw an infinite parabola on a piece of a4.
It will have a start and end point, due to the limitations of the available space.
You'll also be able to repeat it exactly until you run out of paper.
As for using a sine wave as representation of history, it doesn't work.
The main problem is, while history follows a rough pattern, it is highly variable.
One empire may rise quickly, and fall just as quickly.
The next may rise slowly and fall slowly.
The next empire may pick up before the previous empire falls below it's start point.
One empire may not reach the peaks or lows of the previous.
There may be a period of stagnation, flat line, between empires.
etc.
@@chrisbaker8533I see what you're saying but the initial quote effectively says "history oscillates like a parabola" but a parabola does not oscillate - there is no repetition.
I think a sine wave was proposed because it does oscillate
I don’t know. If for an instant I thought “give everyone $1M” Before the words would come out of my mouth, I would think 320 million million is too many millions.
It just means 320 billions smh... ;)
Ansariz Bros Production 320 million million is 320 trillion lol
1 trillion is 10^12 In British and American English
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
@@BigBird3502No, it isn't.
Billion, bi-llion, two millions, i. e. million million or million squared.
Trillion is million cubed, or 1,000000,000000,000000.
@@xCorvus7x, you're using the long scale, where a billion is a million millions, and a trillion is a million billion. The short scale is the standard in both the US and Britain (since 1974). In the short scale, a billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion.
another way to see the mistake:
You've got 500 million.
You give 1 million away to one person.
Then you have 499million.
How many times can you do that?
500 times in total. Not 327.000.000 times.
Came in here to give this example too as I think this is a more concrete way to think about it.
You havent heard of leverage? lol
This is because division is repeated subtraction. Most people don't know that. They just "hate math".
@@joshuajoyce7890 i genuinely dislike math, but that's something i learned in 3. Grade? (Not from the U.S. but i would assume you get taught basic division in america?)
This explained it so much better for me
The biggest mistake is that Aliens Guy isn't the right meme for that text in the first place
Thanks god they did not get the rights to use the image
Tsoukalos is right for _any_ text. One day, mankind will understand that. I already know it, because I was told by... well, I'm not going to say it was aliens.
But it was aliens.
I feel like whoever made the image either thought someone stupid would think of that maths (making the image correct in its use) or they were stupid and so wouldn't realize the image carries with it negative connotations.
No, it was exactly the right image for that text. He's always accompanied by crackpot reasoning. Unlike the Bloomberg tweet, the Obamacare one was satire.
you should publish a book about meme mistakes
This is why anytime I do a calculation, I make a sanity check. Like I recently heard some statistics from an environmentalist group that ended up concluding the average American uses over 100 paper straws per week. Without checking their raw data or their calculations, a moments thought would say that result is ... Very unlikely. I don't know where their mistake was, but they either had bad raw data or they made an arithmetic mistake somewhere.
straws georg, who uses 1.8 trillion paper straws a year, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted
The problem isn't that they took the millions off, it's that they didn't put it back on right. "Give 1.5 million dollar to each million people" would have been accurate, after all.
Which is the same as when you say "Give 1.5 dollars to each one"
@@SammYLightfooD Unless they divide the population in groups of million and each group is given 1 million USD. Whatever they do with it.
Though that wouldn't work in America.
Edit: or 1,5 million doesn't matter
@@jdj4192 I know I just wanted to emphasize it.
1.5 millions even more inaccurate
Is this a joke? Lol
I spell it "czech". I collect a payczech every two weeks.
I resemble that remark!
what you be spending your money on ;) European companionship?
Some of those Bohemian paypeople are worth czeching out 👢
@@alanprihoda7772 I think it's called reeuro now 😸
Aspoň že nám platíš
"It is indeed disturbing"
Yes, yes it is.
And a very in-credible of putting it ;)
+
""It is indeed disturbing
Yes, yes it is."
Indeed, it is disturbing."
Yes, yes it is.
"It is indeed disturbing
Yes, yes it is."
"Indeed, it is disturbing.
Yes, yes it is."
Indeed, it is disturbing.
My favorite line in the video
I feel he is being pretty generous here. No matter how much pressure, if the results of being able to get everybody 1 million doesn't set of alarm bells, there just is something wrong with your ability for skeptical thinking.
and yet you most likely still think that Einstein's theories are rational and correct.
If I take a plane, travel to an other continent, there I can find a connection. But it is so far off, I can't be bothered. @@everythingisalllies2141
@everythingisalllies2141
they are.
without relitivity, gps wouldn't work. without his work on energy and how it relates to matter, we wouldn't understand how to harness the power of the atom and calculate the power of nuclear weapons.
Einstein's theories are for the most part, well established, and paint a very accurate model of the universe.
@@Reverend_Salem That's the story you have been spoon fed. The reality is totally different.
@@everythingisalllies2141 prove it.
I'll be honest, when I first saw tweets like this, my brain immediately assumed "so that's like $1 per person right?"
And then when the tweet claimed it was one million per person, I was like "oh....yeah, guess that seems right. mk".
My own laziness thwarted me again.
I think that happened to most of us
Same , but without the mistake.
@@angel-ig same, we really have to trust ourselves more.
Reading the tweet, I thought "wait, nobody can spend 500 *trillion*"
Right? And when I realized that only 327 people could have received the $1 million, it made much more sense. The "drop the zeros/units" was so drilled into my brain as a kid that it is the default in the wrong situation.
Nearly 750K views on this video. Only 36K likes. Quick division: That means only twenty-thousand percent of viewers cared to like the video.
Shameful.
@dghi it was a joke, mainly pointed on the part “ twenty-thousand percent"
Comments are better at least. 750K / 6K comments, that's a cool one hundred and twenty thousand percent.
I get the joke but it should be 4.8 thousand percent and not twenty thousand since 36/750 = 0.048 = 4.8%
Haaa haa ha 😁
I laughed......HARD
“The human brain is not good at math it’s good at learning math”
-Matt Parker
Well it seems like there's a whole heap of people whose brain isn't good at learning maths either.
@@Thermalions or anything else.
@@Thermalions
Everybody's brain is good at learning math, even those who suffer from brain problems (with exceptions).
The problem is that children DO NOT WANT to learn in general (including and especially math). A lot of this comes down to social problems (in schools it's considered "cool" to not bother studying, and if you're good at math, you're considered a nerd and bullied).
@@meyes1098 Remember kids, tell everyone else maths is uncool and beat them while at the same time learning maths to a high level, this way, everyone will be dependent on you for maths.
Here, I think you dropped these... ‘s’ ‘s’
Your face at 6:49 is just golden. Thanks for that:D
Let's not forget that the money isn't "wasted" on ads. The money still went to (presumably) American businesses and individuals who were responsible for the campaign.
Spending money doesn't make it mysteriously disappear. He did give that $500 million to other Americans, it was just in exchange for a service.
Don't try to bring reality into a discussion of economics. We're decent people here. We make all our important decisions by knee-jerk reactions and emotional manipulation, not thinking.
How much added value do ads bring to an economy?
@@taufiqutomo It's not how much the ads bring, it's how much was spent on the ads.
That money isn't just vanishing, it's being given to a presumably American business (or maybe collection of businesses), which means employees get paid, meaning the money stays in the American economy
Is that well-spent money though? Spending on medical research would be more valuable than on ads.
Sure you could be sympathetic with the ad companies, but well, that labor could've been used better.
@@wiczus6102 Those ad people buy food, which gives money to the food industry. Those farmers are old, which means that they need joint replacement surgery by a large chance. The money, though gradually and inefficiently, does go to wherever you want it to if you look hard enough.
No problem with considering millions as units. You just have to realize that with division and multiplication you have to also apply the operation to the unit. Just like you do with any unit in sciences like physics.
Exactly. The same as with the dollar and people units. That's why the result is 1.53 $/person and not just $1.53.
And Matt forgot the unit on the denominator (people) so the unit of the answer is $/person
Same with 1000000 Joules and one megajoul. The million is in the unit
You mean "Just like you do with any unit in any calculation."?
@@PlainPlaneOfficial I specifically mentioned physics, because I think that's where most people learn to do arithmetic on units
Funnily enough, you _can_ take the millions off in the division, as long as you put it back in _all_ the places you removed it!
500 (milliondollars)
divided by
327 (millionpersons)
equals
~1.53 (milliondollars per *million* persons)
Bloomberg could've just given a million dollars to every *_million_* person! ;)
Didn't really understand why they keep getting it wrong but thanks to your comment I did finally. Thanks for that. Somehow giving a million dollars to a million people sounds more that one dollar per person. Probably because a million USD ist less abstract because i know how much I could buy with it. I've never seen a million people therefore I'm having trouble to imagine how big the group would be. 🤔
The Bloomlottery! MOST people get $1.53, some lucky chunk will get $1,000,000! 🤑
@@Jonas089 i actually hope uou're not serious, because that deduction is actually almost elementary.. i can't actually believe someone had to make a video about this since it's just common sense..
@@shaclown7721 I do understand how the math is wrong (which is quite obvious). I didn't understand how so many people can get something this basic that wrong. The comment helped me understand since I didn't really in the video.
Me, an intellectual: *megaperson*
“Why do people keep getting this wrong?”
The lowest investment in public education out of any of our peer nations. Among every nation on Earth, the US ranks 65 in percentage of GDP spent on education. SIXTY FIVE. There are countries that barely have electricity in their major cities that still invest more of their money on education. It’s hard to understand how basic mathematics function or how even to READ when your government thinks basic education is a privilege for the scions of the aristocracy and the working poor should be thankful their kids are allowed to work 8-12 hour shifts at McDonalds.
Matt: "Up until this point, I was pretty convinced they were about to point out it was wrong."
Me: "they're... they're NOT???"
1,000,000% Shook
I thought this whole thing was an Internet meme until I saw this extract
@@christiansitzman5601 10 kiloshook
They weren't wrong. It was an incredible way to put it - as in not credible.
That's funny, I thought the exact same thing
GRAMATICCALY INCORRECT
A fan of David Mitchell are we?
yes in the original meaning!
hey nice. I like when people think about the words they use and what they mean. It's one entry to philosophy
I think this is just the perfect example of “the risk I took was calculated, but god am I bad at math”
Underrated comment haha +1
Ah bud that is a perfect example
HA! I've never heard this before, but it's great
Can we just appreciate his use of the interrobang in the title‽
He should have just given everyone $1.53 and I could have bought myself a chocolate bar.
what kind of chacolate
@@mtheg7220
Hershey's white chocolate
Not Claptrap The Cookies and Cream one
@@salj.5459 yeah that's what I meant
Don't mind me; I just clicked 'view replies' to randomly stumble upon three strangers casually chatting about chocolate. Please Continue, didn't want to interrupt anyone.
Is it just me? I realize everyone here saw the error straight away, but "the zeros cancel out" was banged into my head as a kid, so the million/million vanished immediately as I read it.
At first, only one million vanished in my head, but knowing that the statement was false I instantly read a second time and realized.
Ditto
Simplifying the equation gives you the answer without having to deal with all the pesky zeroes, you just have to remember that you can't add them back in. Since anything multiplied by 0 is 0 and you can't divide by a non-value, they basically cancel out. Just writing it out as 500 ÷ 327 will give the same solution as 500 mil ÷ 327 mil.
I don't know that that helps you at all, but it's how my brain works it out.
@@erinhaury5773: I think most people who accepted the tweet did this.
500 million ÷ 327 million...
*drop the million as a unit*
500 ÷ 327 = 1.529
*add the million as a unit back in*
1.529 million
Matt didn't quite put it that way visually in his video, but I think this is what he was meaning that people do.
@@Sonathan1893 I fell for it, but watching this at 2:40 am though won't have helped the situation o_O
That doesn't mean I'm sure I would have noticed it right away though at a different time of day :/
I heard “eighteen million sheep” so I was already really confused.
Same here.
Easy: negative thirty two million sheep.
Fun story: when I was teaching my two oldest kids the concept of negative numbers when they were little, they would joke to each other: "What's a Christmas tree minus a Christmas tree with lights?" The other would answer: "Negative lights!" And then they would burst into laughter. It was adorable.
Heard or herd?
If you herd that many sheep, it might be confusing too.
Lyle Boudreau except that doesn’t much sense. Some things can only be defined as positive values, and simply, the laws of quantum mechanics forbid this.
I had to say this, no one can think for themselves unless they are in a critical thinking mood.
No need of confusion.
Million is a scale, dollar is a unit. If scales are equal, the +/- doesn't affect the scale but ×/÷ changes the scale.
When doing any operation, don't remove any of the terms aside since sometimes, they can also get cancelled.
On that note. Please note, functions can never be cancelled. (Referring to the famous sin x/n = six mistake)
High school chemistry taught me that units aren’t just labels for your numbers that you can shove to the side while you do math; units actively participate .
As Dr. Evil says "Why make trillions when we can make billions?"
"A trillion is more than a billion, numnuts."
If Dr. Evil Made A Trillion Dollars, Prices Would Probably Explode And That Trillion Would Shrink!
In England a billion used to mean a million millions, which is a trillion in the US. They have since changed their ways to match the US counting. Google it.
@@quinn7894 alright zip it
@@guysteel That's interesting, but, a trillion was still more. (for a few seconds I thought that meant that it used to be equivalent to what is now 10 billion, I knew there was something wrong with that in my head, but, I corrected myself a little later lmao. I guess that's a similar mistake like in the video lol)
we live in a strange period of time, where you need to explain this to adults.
Maybe some kids could do the explaining.
No, not at all. Humans, ALL Humans, are wired to answer intuitively not think through as it takes time. In the wild, thinking in a dangerous situation can get an animal killed. Now if they took alittle more than a few seconds they would have all caught that it's actually wrong.
@@OrAngeAnArchy “thinking in a dangerous situation can get an animal killed” No. No it can’t.
@@daerdevvyl4314 elaborate please.
If a predator is right in front of you, and you spend time thinking wht to do you will die, if you think quick you would act faster and survive
@@Gamer-uf1kl That’s right, think quick. OrAngeAnArchy said thinking would get the animal killed, not thinking slowly.
Someone in NBC did correct them .... Later in the broadcast, Williams said he “misinterpreted” the tweet. “Tonight on the air we quoted a tweet that relied on bad math. We corrected the error after the next commercial break and have removed it from later editions of tonight’s program. We apologize for the error.”
So even the commenters here (myself included) who castigated the anchors for their confirmation bias were ourselves guilty of confirmation bias...
I have dyscalculia and it gets in the way all the time. But oh my god, does it get in the way super badly with trying to do mental maths like this. You are right, I drop as much "unneeded" information as possible so I can maintain the figures in my head. Unfortunately that unneeded information is in fact needed.
What
Are you trying to say you're bad at math
@@shamancredible8632 No. I have dyslexia and dyscalculia. I also had a late development of speech and I have a slight speech impediment. All of these things are loosely related. It just means that trying to mentally store a larger sequence of numbers in my head can be difficult. I’m pretty good at maths, I just require paper to be able to store all the figures I need. It’s the same as remembering phone numbers and postcodes too, I’ll often quickly forget them. One quick way for me to do mental maths is to try and simplify the amount of integers so I can hold on to them longer in my head.
2+2 is 4
÷4 that's 1 million
Quick maffs
Man's not smart.
Mans def smoked trees before that one
2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 2
I remember on youtube i once heard
1: "hey can i have half of the $20 you won?"
2. "half of 20 is like 12 so no"
@@whatisthis2809 I mean, 10 is like 12. It's like the "How many earths can fit in the sun? At least 6". It's not exactly wrong, even if it is stupid.
It's not "can I get my calculator out", it's "have you even thought about how implausible it is to give _everyone_ 1 million dollars?"
they real question is: do you even think at all? ;)
Ask the people of Zimbabwe how that worked out for them, they are all billionaires, and still can't afford to buy a bowl of rice.
yup they even commented how unbelivable it was- yet didnt stop to think why lol. without even thinking of the math you should realise its totally wrong.
To give everyone in the US $1,000,000 it would cost about 300 manned trips to Mars
yeah! How deconnected from reality are you to be okay with that kind of reasonning
I know that we can make mistakes, and that's ok. But the fact that so many people just accepted the wrong answer, and went with it without questioning it is really worrying.
MSNBC believe anything though. I wish we had something like the donahue show today.
They knew better, they aren't THAT stupid, they just think YOU are.
Exactly, people are more likely to just accept something is real without taking the time to question it...
Anyways, thanks John Cena! Big fan!
Kind of like all those Pro-Trump and Anti-Biden memes my elderly family members share on Facebook. 10 seconds of research would prove them wrong, but they aren't interested i the truth, they just want what they're reading to be real and justify their hate.
@@Fartquarium or kinda like how anti trumpers believe anything the news spews out because it justifies their hate. I fixed it for you
That seems to be a very American problem. In other countries people are able to do grade 2 math.
The obvious sanity check would be what is 327 million X 1 million. That's 327 Trillions (or billions in the UK)
@@KenFullmana billion is the same in the US and UK, in French a billion is a trillion.
@@adamfanning9412You might want to try googling "American Billion vs British Billion"
@@adamfanning9412 depends how old you are. For some older generations in the UK, a billion = a million * a million. But yes nowadays we use billion = 10^9 most commonly
Here's the reason shoddy maths like this get accepted: Most people who don't know much about maths will generally not second-guess the math of someone who sounds like they know what they're talking about. _Moreover,_ when lots of people accept a figure, it takes even more for people to second-guess the shoddy maths. If sufficient numbers of people accept it, even people who _do_ know maths will hesitate to second-guess it. That's our herd mentality for you.
That's how religion and partisan politics works too, right?
My HS chemistry teacher helped me avoid this mistake for the rest of my life. He had us include the units in all the steps of or math. While I still think of "million" as a unit instead of 10^6, I know that I have to divide the unit "million" by the unit "million" reducing the unit to "times 1".
EDITED: Well, I'm guessing the "indivisble" in US Pledge of Allegiance takes a whole new meaning. It just means its citizens can't divide 2 numbers
It took me a while to understand you meant that it "takes a whole new meaning".
Note: I often have the same problem when typing on my phone with my big fingers. The "i" is right next to the "o", so my "locks" become "licks".
Are you referring to the Pledge of Allegiance? The word "indivisible" doesn't show up in the Constitution at all.
Someone's looking really stupid right now.....
Do you mean the pledge of allegiance?
Bongeler well we know he’s not American...
This was a wonderfully eloquently way of saying 'people are stupid'
"Very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man."
-- G. K. Chesterton, _The Everlasting Man_ (1925)
I was ready to make a comment saying that this is just Matt discovering shitposting and missing the joke, but then he explained how people get the numbers and showed that news clip and now I don't know what to think
I wasn't confused about it at all until I watched the video
It wasnt a shitpost. The person who wrote this tweet followed it up with another tweet basically saying they didnt care their math was wrong but that their point still stood.... which it didnt.
@@arisrider8175 These people should be shot. Or at least castrated and not allowed to vote. I refuse to believe somebody without room temp IQ or severe brain damage and genes definitely not worth preserving could make such a mistake, even if they had terrible math education.
What to think: "people are morons."
Any person guilty of making this mistake shall be sentenced to revisiting pre-school.
The initial mistake isn't even the biggest problem imo. Everyone has brainfarts from time to time. The problem is that the absurd result doesn't lead them to second guess themselves. It's that mixture of intellectual laziness and ignorance that's the problem.
That obviously didn't work the first time, so a more sensible suggestion would be demanding Matt and other bright sparks being shown regularly in prime time slots all over the world.
***makes the mistake intentionally then*** YAY! NAPTIME!!!
You don't do long division on pre-school though. Let alone work out millions. I mean, if you're willing to annul people's childhood scholastic achievements over a maths mistake go ahead, but at least don't make the primal misitake of sending them back to potty-training because that's not the skills the average human is failing to demonstrate enough mastery of.
@@moscanaveia
I couldn't think of a better response! Very nicely put.
I feel like this is highlighting a difference between math and science. What I always teach my students in physics class is to do the math (maths for you Brits!) on the units as well. Don't just drop the units and then plug them back in later. It clears up a lot of mistakes that way. If the units don't work out, then it's likely you set up your equation wrong, or you did the math wrong.
If you treat "million dollars" as the unit rather than just dollars, it still works out if you do the math on the units. 500 divided by 327 is about 1.5; million dollars divided by million people is dollars per people (not million dollars per people).
Side note: Would a million dollars be one Megadollar?
Yes to your sidenote.
Also, excellent explanation.