On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 11:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> Tim Peters writes: > > > "Sum reduction" and "running-sum accumulation" are primitives in > > many peoples' brains. > > I wonder what Kahneman would say about that. He goes to some length > to explain that people are quite good (as human abilities go) at > perceiving averages over sets but terrible at summing the same. Maybe > they substitute the abstraction of summation for the ability to > perform the operation? > [OT] How is that human ability tested? I am a visual learner and I would propose that if you have a set of numbers, you can graph it in different ways to make it easier to perceive one or the other (or maybe both): - to emphasize the average, draw a line graph -- in my mind I draw a line through the average (getting the trend for free) - to emphasize the sum, draw a histogram -- in my mind I add up the sizes of the bars -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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