[Lack of] Numeracy Rant

"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura)
06/21/2018 at 21:47 • Filed to: None

As in, half the effort?
Such-and-such is ten times less. And you are a dunce.

DISCUSSION (42)

Bman76 (hates WS6 hoods, is on his phone and has 4 burners now) > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 21:58

But more is more better tho

OPPOsaurus WRX > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 22:05

2x things to break

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 22:12

Counter consideration: ease is not a numerically defined quality, and as such no numeric qualification has any real meaning outside vulgar or metaphorical rhetoric . Such a use is not meaningful, but not per se wrong.

In other words, it doesn't strictly mean anything, but a loose meaning is understood easily and fits with common expression.

4muddyfeet - bare knuckle with an EZ30 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 22:15

2 times easy is definitely more easy than one easy

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > 4muddyfeet - bare knuckle with an EZ30
06/21/2018 at 22:22

Much shorter version of what I was trying to say. “Much easier”, rhetorically paraphrased “twice as easy”, not correct to some measured number somewhere, but that's irrelevant.

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 22:25

I bought a pair of these and the exact same thing popped out at me. Who did this and why are they employed?

DipodomysDeserti > Eric @ opposite-lock.com
06/21/2018 at 22:53

You bought them, right?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/21/2018 at 23:07

Half the effort is pretty clear.

SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 23:12

Yes but does it make for an effective hammer?

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/21/2018 at 23:15

Just what we need: innumerate engineers, bandiers of semantics, clueless people buying more crap informed by baseless claims, a wall.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > 4muddyfeet - bare knuckle with an EZ30
06/21/2018 at 23:15

That's funny though.

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > DipodomysDeserti
06/21/2018 at 23:16

Yes, because they were the only ones of the type I needed at the store I bought them from. They could have been packaged in a brown cardboard box with a sharpie drawing of a pair of bypass clippers and I would have bought them. Hell, they could have just written what they were on this imaginary box and I still would have bought them.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > DipodomysDeserti
06/21/2018 at 23:17

No. I bought the more expensive ones that were half as easy.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Eric @ opposite-lock.com
06/21/2018 at 23:17

They are employed, in part, because you bought them.

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/21/2018 at 23:19

And their reps got them into whatever store I bought them from.

Future Heap Owner > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 00:20

Your rant assumes their job is to be precise & accurate. It’s not. Their job is to find the words to sell the most things, largely to the average person, half the time to the below average person.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Future Heap Owner
06/22/2018 at 07:02

And my job is to develop and teach numeracy and there are a lot of lazy people out there. And innumerate.

Future Heap Owner > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 07:26

Ah right, you teach math? So y ou’ve gotta get them familiar with it before the main thing they’ll see is this crap. And you have a big disadvantage.

I sure hope I try my hand at math education later in life myself.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 08:02

“Half the effort” is a quantifiable description because effort has quantity. “Ease” does not have quantity, but is readily - intuitively- understood to be inversely related to effort. Descriptive, if not precise.

I’m fairly certain “twice as easy!” has been in the common vernacular for time im memorial, and “2x easier ” is merely an awkward statement of that. If your argument is that marketing isn't allowed to use idiom, I'm not sure what to say to that.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Future Heap Owner
06/22/2018 at 08:38

They are so innumerate. They can’t wrap their heads around what half of something means, let alone a fraction like 1/2. It’s because math teaching in the primary grades is weak and the kids fall back on calculators early in life.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 08:41

You are due credit for taking me to the barricade on this one. As for idiom in marketing, well, I’ve nothing to say to that either. My complaint is about laziness and innumeracy and that clipper packaging is a bright example of those.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 09:02

My primary beef was that your observation that it wasn’t most correct made me then wonder if it was actually wrong. After a moment’s thought, it occurred to me that it wasn’t as such. I absolutely reject that the packaging is *wrong* in any other way than being imprecise in absolute terms, which makes your complaint... wait for it... semantic.

In your position as a math teacher, the most precise statement is clearly to be preferred, and the choice is obvious. However, given the choice to describe something as half of a bad thing or twice a good thing , the correct choice to a marketer is equally obvious. That’s marketing 101, and also a strong indication that it was not an engineer who designed the package.

I’m not immune to your appeal, here, as I struggle every day with the generation of technical documents which must be as precise and clear
as possible and communicating with others *in* that generation process tends to be the opposite of that. I just have enough of a contrary streak that I thought to examine the begged question: “Things cannot be twice as easy”.

In any case, complaining that idioms are innumerate (is a bird in the hand *really* worth two in the bush?!) and citing that as a point of existential crisis comes off a bit Unabomber -ish. Or at the least Basil Fawlty-ish.

Kinja'd!!!

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 09:09

I would think that if anyone on Oppo knew a single thing about semantics, it would be you. And I will totally accept that my argument was one of semantics and I assumed it to stand out as such. Numeric semantics, if you will... But still: the point was to lament the lack of preciseness in common language -- and numerical -- usage in our society.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 09:17

I understood it as such. Mostly, I came here to have an argument.

Kinja'd!!!

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 09:24

A refreshing argument it was, thank you. In fact, we could vote on it, but let’s put off the vote until next week and get a moderator to issue an executive order instead.

Seriously though: phrases such as “ten times less” get used with some frequency and not only in marketing. And if I ask, “Does that simply mean one tenth as much?” they have no idea what I am asking. Personally? I think we should re- institute the fraction.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 09:25

Maybe that’s what happened with Donald Trump on Inauguration Day: Kellyanne said there were two times less people in attendance and Trump stopped listening after “two times” and took it from there.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 09:56

“[X] times less” is more irritating to me because it doesn’t have as clear an idiomatic usage. Ease and difficulty are inverse, and time (quantifiable) is a function of difficulty (less quantifiable), which makes use easy.

“times less” is confusing because “less” in non-math idiom still usually means “subtract” and not “divide”. This was probably less (heh) of a problem in times past with phrases of diminishment and division having a little more variety and the parting of things being more common. Middle Ages use of fractions even among the illiterate seems as if it would have been high... but along with that, you’d have had idiomatic use to deal with. “[X] times less” may well be a holdover, and may have once been less difficult.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 10:12

On further reflection, I’m almost certain historical usage is where “[X] times less” originates, because it would come from instruction to one dividing to divide into [X] parts. No relation to the mathematical “times” whatsoever, except in parallel.

German use of “times” ( mal) is very fluid - “noch einmal” - “one more time”, “einmal” - “once, “zehn mal” - “ten times”, and similar Anglo-Saxon usage to dictate how many instances something might be divided into may be the origin.

ttyymmnn > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 10:24

Interesting discussion with Ramblin Rover. Many years ago I drove a delivery van for an ad agency. I hung out with the artists and copy writers because they were way cooler than the ad execs. I was taking to a writer one day about copy and I pointed out that a sentence started with “and.” I said that in college they told us not to do that. He said that in marketing the rules are different. I think the point is that clarity is more important than precision.

Spoon II > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 11:00

For the claim to be accurate, it has to be based on leverage, which is defined by physics. Therefore 2x easier means twice the leverage, which means half the applied force. For them to say twice as easy and mean anything else is false advertising.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Spoon II
06/22/2018 at 11:11

That wasn’t his complaint. His complaint was that it was correct to say “half the effort” and that “twice as easy” was wrong. Either your case or sharper blades or any number of things could cut the effort in half, which would *in the idiom* make it “twice as easy”. It is an idiom rather than a straightforward statement, which was my point.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 13:47

“times less” is confusing because “less” in non-math idiom still usually means “subtract” and not “divide”.

Unless your divisor < 1

I like your historical reference to people having to divide things less often now. That is an idea that I will mention in my classroom. Frequently.

Would you mind explaining to me what you mean here by idiom or idiomatic? I’ve looked up the word, but I can’t quite parse how you are using it.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 13:53

Perhaps, but I assume that you and I have each put twice as much much thought into this so that the guy who wrote the package copy spent four times less time on it than we did.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Spoon II
06/22/2018 at 13:53

Thank you.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 13:54

Not my complaint, but my evidence, or my example.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 14:20

Idiom or idiomatic usage here in this case is taken to mean a word or combination of words being used in an atypical way for a specific or specialized purpose. In the sense that (by definition of idiom) it is “not taken literally”, I refer to a literal meaning of the words not making sense in another context. Specifically, a mathematical term (or a term typically taken for one) used to refer to something which does not have a quantity would be idiomatic. Possibly allusive.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 14:26

If you think about it, “four times more [time] ” or “four times [as long]” is an odd structure in and of itself. “Four times as many (as this)“ is rather self-explanatory. “More, four times” is not clear by the plain meaning of the words. It is likely an inverted form of what I was talking about, the partitioning of goods. “Bring together this and others like it, four total”. It’s the mathematical lexicon to blame here, because “times” is really “times [x] more” in math common use, and never used for division, where before modern instruction it would have not been as distinct.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 14:26

My initial reaction to this is that mathematics as a body of thought or representation will not lend itself well to idiomatic expression, though the marketer assumed that it would. If my original complaint was Part A , then this might be Part 2 .

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 14:38

Agreed. However, in English at least, it is likely that even the vocabulary of math is a condensed form of a more plain (but more ambiguous) way of speaking. “Times” is an odd choice of word for the action when you think about it. The conflict only arises because the old pattern of use is still around in confusion with the more “perfected” system.

One could easily write a book about odd carryovers like this in English, and the cases in which speakers have so-to-say practiced Irish Democracy on attempts to regularize. Or just odd shifts in general - I noticed in the middle of the week something that I’d probably *known* all my life but never recognized, that possessives of nouns regarding other nouns were much, much more common in the first half of the century. Saying “the engine room ’s boiler”, that kind of thing. As a construction, that has almost completely died out.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 15:32

I seldom encounter people I consider to be more of a pedant than I consider myself to be. You have passed the test.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
06/22/2018 at 15:57

It’s a hobby, I suppose. I have several.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
06/22/2018 at 17:12

Nothing wrong with it, but unlike the Fawlty Towers GIF might suggest , I do not think either of us are budding Nazis.