There is no answer. That's not the point. They want to know your response anyway. Will you be funny, loud, blunt - whatever you do, answer.
[deleted]
How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#12I missed the opportunity to answer this question, especially when I gathered the cues at the bottom of the post to recognize what the question was trying to do.
It's like watching a video about asking people where the matters in a tree comes from. You now know the answer instead of being made to think it out.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#13Can we give points to the one who answered 42?
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#14How would you answer this question if you got it during a job interview? Oddly, it seems a bit like the infamous "spit ball an answer to how many dentists there are in Cleveland" type questions Google was famous (or infamous) for. The number of sheep might be a clue to age if shepherds accumulate sheep in a lifetime (naturally, no reason to think they do, sadly).
There's a lot of authority issues involved. Do you admit to an authority that you don't know how to solve X? Do you challenge an authority that they don't know either? Do you doubly challenge that authority by alleging they gave you a bullshit question for kicks?
And after authorities throw such a question at students, they're happy to draw conclusions about what feeble solution efforts the student made?
And this is after students have been inured to treating math as a bondage and discipline exercise in following instructions, after math has been drained of any large meaning.
The people did this experiment should be whipped with a wet noodle.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#15Timothy Gowers had a similar point at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot (dead link now): > if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being train…
NB: Searching by numeric G+ UUID sometimes works, though in this case, the Wayback Machine seems not to have captured the URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703...
There's a mapping of a few notable G+ usernames here, including Dr. Gowers:
https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Name...
We tried. Sorry.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#16I work for a government agency. You’d be surprised how often we play very complex versions of this game. Or maybe you wouldn’t. In any case, in my experience, about once a week. Essentially, your sponsors lets you know they want an answer to an unanswerable question (“how can we best weaponize salmon?”). Then we play “guess the answer the sponsor wants”.
>> (“how can we best weaponize salmon?”)
Is the intended target a population of bears? In that case, I have a cunning plan...
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#17The correct answer is: 5
Safer answer:
3 Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#18I had to look up what eight grade age was. It's apparently 13-14. FYI.
Kids brains are not developed well at that age, plus being given endless questions at school to which there are answers will accustom them to assuming an answer exists. Standing up to authority is something they aren't taught to do, in fact the opposite. I can understand what's going on. At that age I'd say what I think (and sometimes get into trouble for it) but most wouldn't - and as adults I still find a lot of people won't, which is beyond saddening.
Can anyone recall the study where adults were asked to estimate something (IIRC whether one line was shorter or longer than another) and when actors were there to give the wrong answer, some people were pressured into agreeing with something that was obviously wrong.
The question may also be thought of as a trick, per the old riddle: "A man stepped out of his tent with his rifle and walked 1 mile south, 1 mile east and 1 Mile north. Then he shot a bear in front of his tent. What color was the bear?".
Some of this problem lies with us adults I guess.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#19The “maths” section of the Swedish SAT actually only deals with exactly this type of question (or at least it did last time I took it).
You get one question “how old is the shepherd” and then two pieces of information A: there are 125 sheep B: there are 5 dogs.
The alternatives for answering the question is whether it can be answered using A alone, B alone, requires both A and B, can be solved with either A or B, or can’t be solved at all.
This is a failure if 13-14 year olds are so used to being given questions that can be answered, that they are uncomfortable telling an authority that “it’s not possible to answer this”. It’s probably universal and I’m sure the same result could be found in Sweden despite our SAT’s (done later) have a whole section on finding nonsense.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)
#20Timothy Gowers had a similar point at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot (dead link now): > if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver? A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being train…
NB: Searching by numeric G+ UUID sometimes works, though in this case, the Wayback Machine seems not to have captured the URL: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703... There's a mapping of a few notable G+ usernames here, including Dr. Gowers: https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Name... We tried. Sorry.
Thanks for your efforts! Actually, despite ArchiveTeam's statement of having captured 98.6% of public profiles, I wasn't able to find a single post (let alone a complete list of posts) of a single person I cared about on the Wayback Machine as a result of the last-minute scraping (there were a few that had been crawled earlier): neither any of my friends, nor people like Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao, John Baez, Linus Torvalds, etc. I just assumed it had somehow not been uploaded to the Wayback Machine yet, but if it's gone... oh well. Such is life. Thanks again anyway!