How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)

#21

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 11:20 AM UTC

svat wrote: post #20

dredmorbius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's possible some content hasn't yet been ingested, though I'd thought it would be there by now. Just checked Archiveteam's pages, no clear info there.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)

#22

Post by nkurz » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 2:31 PM UTC

I wonder how much correlation there is between answers to this question in 8th grade and "life success". We can define life success in many ways, including lifetime income, number of offspring, and overall happiness.

My guess would be that the young pedants who refuse to answer the question, saying "not enough information", do worse on average for each of these metrics than their more compliant but completely wrong peers.

(I would have been one of the young pedants)

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)

#23

Post by throwaway-d81 » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #14

How 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 adm…

The people who did this experiment highlighted a very important problem.

Furthermore they provided a ridiculously easy test that gives tangible results.

The question now is, how do we cut this number from 75% to essentially zero.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)

#24

Post by erikpukinskis » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 8:25 PM UTC

I glean from this that the correct answer is 125 / 5 = 25 years old. 16 out of 32 kids can’t be wrong.

Re: How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013)

#25

Post by benj111 » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #3

I 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”.

Swordfish? Manta ray guns? Limpet mines?