That "magic trick" restricts the choices to 8 possibilities: 13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, and 39. He then mentions 19, 17, and 15, psychologically priming the audience into not picking those three numbers. People also have an aversion to picking multiples of 5 as being "random", whereas they like to pick 7, as it seems the most random to people. The likelihood of picking 37 is very high.
hehe yes I commented similar - and indeed the magician/mentalist will have an 'out' for the other numbers, in exactly the same way that veritassium only showed the video where the audience gave the right answer! If the video is made for mystic numerology entertainment , fine , but he certainly pretends to be a scientist
I thought the number was decided beforehand, basically the whole "it's an odd number, not the same" was the magician "reading the mind" of the participant
I just consider it to be a "funny number" like 42, 420, 69420, and 42069. Just that small release of brain chemicals when you see it is oh so satisfying.
As a programmer you could say a 'random number by choice' could be a seed number. So basically the number you give to a random number generator to derive its 'random' number sequence from
Or just the number put in a static number in place of the random one for debugging, to be absolutely sure the rest of the code around it runs as it should
The x.99 pricing isn't about aesthetics, it's about tricking the brain into thinking something is more significantly cheaper than it actually is. People are significantly more likely to buy something for 1.99 than for 2.00 because our brains put more weight on the first digit for efficiency in estimation. So your brain can see 1.99, 2.99 and 5.99 and estimate a total cost of 8 instead of nearly 11. When you're shopping, it's a good idea to round these up and say in your head the rounded up price to break that efficiency pattern your brain uses. There's a whole complex psychology associated with pricing, and some retailers have been notorious for using this to the point of it being a code. Ending in 00 gets your attention because it's so rare. Ending in 98 is something a few do to stand out in ads while still getting the lower number brain trick. And some have numbers they go to only for clearance prices (88, for example) that they use consistently so customers get the idea that there's not going to be a lower price if they wait.
Regarding the programming random number of choice - The Jargon File is absolutely FILLED with jokes like that. I've worked as a software developer since the late 90s and I've never heard this "random number of choice" before today, but there are countless similar jokes from The Jargon File that permeate programming culture. While I've not heard this particular one before, it's immediately obvious to me what the joke is. There is no random in programming. Period. We are using deterministic systems that have consistent outcomes from consistent inputs. Any perceived inconsistency comes from hidden inputs, whether that's cosmic rays causing a single event upset or a bad chip introducing electrical noise. We fake random by taking hard to notice inputs like time or combination of large input sets. For example, if you set the date and time in Minesweeper to a specific second, then generate a new map on that second, you can know exactly what all the tiles are. In normal play the seconds keep ticking so you seemingly don't get the same result twice, making it an easy hidden number for programmers to start from. For "true random" we have to ask hardware that measures quantum effects to give us. Which is still an open question to whether that's truly random either. It could be the universe simulation using its own clock timestamp to determine quantum noise, for all we know. Though as a programmer, I can firmly answer that we statistically should not expect to live in a simulation. The physicists looking at it are basing it on things like the holographic principle, but in computer terms that only gets you memory with no access (ie. just the M out of RAM), resolution (you're using resolution in holography as alternative storage to depth so resolution is inherently lost) or processing (you're using all the space for storage). You can nest simulations but it rapidly becomes less capable with each layer, meaning that no, there aren't statistically more consciousnesses living in a simulation as some experts in the wrong fields to be saying such things assert. We could easily live in a holographic universe as you can shift the resolution outside the scale of our perception (which is also what conformal cyclic cosmology hinges on) but you can't do that with simulating the universe because you need to perceive the resolution to be able to use it for the simulation, meaning a rapidly narrowing band of resolution that can't be subdivided within the simulation. And even if you throw an infinity or five into it, you still end up with a proportion of real to simulated that is heavily weighted to real.
5:59 1337 has some meaning if you played games or hung out in chatrooms in the late 90s or early 2000s. Your brain probably highlights that each time you have seen it on guages in the plant or something.
I'll be honest and say that it's unlikely I'd pick a 7 type number for either answer. The only way it would happen is if I was being led to that answer.
@ArtisChronicles I'm sure. I just found out that I fell into that same sort of bias. I don't agree with everything in the video, it's definitely sensationalized, but I do believe that people have a false sense of what is inherently random. I only really commented originally because I thought it was funny that I fell for the "false randomness" bias that a lot of other people did as well
@@kinexkidOfc it is sensationalized to some degree, all of Veritasiums videos are, but that is exactly why his channel are so popular, but at the same time he still manage to do it in a way it is not entirely false. The fact of the matter is raw science is boring for the vast vast majority of people, so if you want the results out there, you need to sensationalize it somewhat, and I do think Veritasium strikes a good balance there in general
I saw a community post that said that this poll he made was actually the largest random number data set ever which is quite the impressive record to casually achieve
"7" has a societal bias.... it's considered "lucky". Less that it's esthetically pleasing, more that it's a common number seen and used alot as a reference to luck, and when people are guessing at something (anything) the natural assumption is that luck is in play, hence selecting "7".
37 is a number that looks very randomy, both part (3 and 7) is prime, it is a prime, but small enough to be considered. obviously the most random number between 1 and 100 is every single number in the range, as it is a single pick, but for humans that is not the norm to accept.
eh, I think nowadays most people recognize it as 20$. At least I do. I automatically find myself rounding a number when looking at a price, even when its something like 85cents. or 50 cents.
Can we normalize on 'Veritasium' videos being a waste of time? Like a broken clock, their articles are sometimes accurate. But that's due more to coincidence than intention.
This just shows how complex the human mind is and how much is there to it. Even the fact that you have mentioned the reactor power despite it being completely unconnected - construction of patterns.
One of my first jobs out of high school was working for a guy I'll label a landscape architect because I'm not sure what his actual degree was. We were essentially turning many acres of parking lot into a botanical garden for tens of millions of dollars. His rules of thumb for making groupings of plants in numbers small enough count at a glance were: Avoid even numbers. Prefer primes. Prefer 3 and 7. If you have to break the rules, try to visually sub-group into groups that obey the rules. For example, if for some reason you must use 10 of the same small tree, perhaps put 3 higher up a hill and the other 7 lower down and probably skewed a bit left or right. He did also show us what it looks like when the rules are broken, like two clumps of four. Maybe I'm just suggestible, but it really did look better to me when his rules were followed. I would guess the rules might change for something like a formal English garden, but this was supposed to look like something like a natural area where humans stepped in to care for it, kinda like a Buddhist zen garden perhaps.
When someone asks me for a random number, I just use RNG. Otherwise, I personally always pick the smallest possible value (it won't be random anyway). Randomness is inherently counterintuitive to us, as we tend to look for patterns to read our environment. This is both a blessing and a curse.
There are a couple TED talks by a guy calling himself "Rivas" on 4 AM. The first one, he called out a number of 4 AM coincides and made up a whole conspiracy theory out of it. In the second one, he talks about all of the instances in media where 4 AM pops up and why 4 AM was on his mind for the first talk. I suspect that 4 AM suffers from the same thing that 7 and 37 do. 7 is the go to random value for 1-10. 37 is the go to random value for 1-100. And 4 AM is the go to random time for stupid o'clock at night.
I don't get the cynicism. It's not like he stated some mystical numerology as the reason, just an interesting psychological fact about numbers as to why we might choose or see 37 more commonly than others. Like how we see and make faces out of everything - random colloquially means 'sticks out' or seems improbable, so more expected or 'orderly' results don't stand out as much. Plus a few fun facts and clickbait title to get engagement. People have done worse. Like i get it, but I think it's a little silly to expect perfect scientific rigor to light hyperbole, as if they're making an objective universal statement. I don't think anyone's expecting that level from a psychology question about numbers. What gets my goat is when people try to rationalize a hypothetical problem. Like, for the "how long should you wait to choose?" problem he laid out the parameters of the thought experiment: you get one final choice per item, and you don't know the items beforehand. That's it. The metaphor might be a little silly, but it's just as easy to come up with a reason someone can't turn around or research beforehand or just get gas at the first place, as it is to justify why Rose in your textbook needs to by 147 watermelons. It's a minor gripe, but it's silly to question the parameters of the math question because the metaphor they used isn't realistic when taken literally. ... I say this because I had an issue with this for years. I didn't realize I had autism of some sort, and I took things too literally like jokes, or small talk, etc. I had to learn at some point that it's silly of me to expect perfect literal rationale in everyday language, and it's my responsibility to do a little translation in my head where I can before I ask everyone to correct themselves at all times for minor things. That kind of thing. Maybe others have a different opinion. But I really enjoyed the video and the reaction.
I've been using the party trick of making people choose 37 "at random" many times over many years (not too often, maybe once a year). You need to ask them to pick only odd numbers, and they can't be the same. About 9 out of 10 will say 37, because it seems so random to them. Just an anecdote.
I'm fine with people selecting 37 rather often when asked to pick random numbers, maybe there's some psychology behind that, but I agree the finding of real life examples is reaching. Somebody intentionally looking for a certain number, of course it will appear seemingly everywhere.
Hey, loving the channel so far! The example with the gas stations isn't really meant to be a 1:1 comparison with real life - it's just game theory. But on a broader scale - we do move through life in one way only and in some sense, every decision you make is final. Accepting a job offer is final in the sense that you can't go back to the same time and accept a different job if you don't like the one you started first. Even if the other job offers are still on the table, you did spend X time working at a place and that cannot be undone. It might not matter that much if it's in the same field, but imagine the same logic applied to someone who is just figuring out what field they would like to go into. edit - to your questions at around 25:00 - you can imagine that each gas station has a value 'quality' between 1 and the number of stations. You don't know that value for all of them beforehand, you can only discover it once you are at the station and compare it to the previous stations you've seen, and you can't go back.
I just found out there is a new Zelda game, so I finally restarted Breath of the Wild after my old Nintendo broke. I caught a horse; named it Appltater. I've playing Zelda for 37 years.
3,7 and 9 seems most random. We learn, even before school, to count by 1,2,5 and 10. Even numbers somehow seem natural. When having to memorize the multiplication table, I seem to remember 7 and 9s being the hardest.
this guy had only a few thousand subs, now hes almost at 100k. its nice to see people actually want to learn and listen to some nuclear engineer watch a 41 year old guy talk about 37
They did mention it had some importance as a counting value in a way similar to for example phi, but after that I don't think it is really that important. What was interesting is the regularity of the predictions.
What I find wild and mindboggling about primes is that you can have an arbitrarily large gap between them, AND that there are also inifinitely many twin primes, ie primes with only one number between them (twin prime conjecture isnt proven I think, but likely to be true). Those two facts both being true is completely insane to me, that you can choose as large a number you want, literally as impossibly huge as you can imagine, a number so large it makes Graham's number look puny if you want, and there *will* at some point in the numberline be a gap of that size between primes (in fact infinitely many such gaps or larger), while at the same time there are infinitely many occurances on the numberline where there is only one number between two primes. That to me is mindblowing, but perhaps my mind is easily blown.
2:30 that is really important. So many studies is Proof of something, but when You lift up the rooks, look at the questions - it's obvious why that answer was given. How you ask a question, in which context and to how many is more interesting then the final results (if their is a questionable results).
Well if you are paying with cash at least. If you play with card it usually is on the dot. Which has made me think sometimes, like if you do it consistently over a lifetime, you could probably save quite a bit of money if you make sure to pay in cash when the final price of your shopping is rounded down, and with card, if it would otherwise be rounded up (that can often be a lot of other numbers than just .99 due to adding together from multiple wares). But it also is way too tedious and the benefit would be a looooooong time one, in the moment you would not feel it, which makes it so much harder to justify doing it to yourself
I watched the original video. Going in, I was really excited. I thought there was going to be some interesting numerology, or mathematical deductions. I found the original video unconvincing, and a waste of time. I'm glad you did a reaction, and minimally, ended up in the same, unconvinced boat as me.
this is my comment i left on the Veritassium channel: Another clickbaity one from Veritasium. Yes most of the videos are fun and amazing but occasionally we get this kind of thing. Veritassium - 37 is "Humanity's number of choice" - in that case - can we do a video for each number "Why do we see the number 1 everywhere... why do we see the number 15 everywhere" etc. The utility function of waiting for the first the first 37 (but not actually 37) percent of opportunities to pass before picking the next best one is tenuous at best. A lot of this is just chance and wouldn't apply if we weren't using base 10. Showing images of the number 37 on house doors or road signs with spooky music doesn't make it any more significant then any other number. Professor Ray Hyman does a lot of work on this kind of thing, where we see significance in things like numbers - especially when it's presented in a spooky way within the context of it giving more meaning to our lives. He investigated mystics, and it seems that this Veritasium guy is getting good at blending the pseudoscience with the mysticism. Maybe he is running out of ideas. Oh its not really scientific to remove 1, 2, 99, 100, 42 , 69 etc just because 'outliers' Another clickbaity one from Veritasium. Yes most of the videos are fun and amazing but occasionally we get this kind of thing. Can we do a video for each number "Why do we see the number 1 everywhere... why do we see the number 15 everywhere" etc. The utility function of waiting for the first the first 37 (but not actually 37) percent of opportunities to pass before picking the next best one is tenuous at best. A lot of this is just chance and wouldn't apply if we weren't using base 10. Showing images of the number 37 on house doors or road signs with spooky music doesn't make it any more significant then any other number. Professor Ray Hyman does a lot of work on this kind of thing, where we see significance in things like numbers - especially when it's presented in a spooky way within the context of it giving more meaning to our lives. He investigated mystics, and it seems that this Veritasium guy is getting good at blending the pseudoscience with the mysticism. Maybe he is running out of ideas. Oh its not really scientific to remove 1, 2, 99, 100, 42 , 69 etc (and 73 for that matter) just because 'outliers' or whatever - and then to remove, 73 , 7, 77 (with the spooky music in the background) And the magicians "force" to 37 is just that, a force. He is scripting to eliminate all the other numbers to leave a potential 3 or 4 to choose from (he will have an outcome for any of these), and then the one chosen for this video is 37 in any case - often these mentalists / magicians wont get the the number 37 Its also designed so that if we 'complain' about the science, he can retort that its just fun
Numbers are for the most part fascinating. Numerology always makes me loose interest completely. Beyond that its fun to discover patterns and more. Also how numbers affect you in different ways. I tend to react more to the time 13:37 but only because of growing up with 90s hollywood hacker movies and being a computer geek. I have no other connection to that numbers. Also, picking 69 when asked for a number feels boring. Not much creativity or thinking outside the box with those people i guess. Even if its a automatic quick response it still says a lot about the person.
Language is notoriously fuzzy, so I think the reason you can say "the most random number" and be understood and provided with a statistically significant answer is that 'random' has a colloquial definition of "strange or unpredictable" stemming from how humans typically react to phenomena that are recognisably random. I think primes seem more random because they only exist as multiples of one or products of higher numbers: so they don't come into existence like most things in our lives. They don't grow like we expect things to do at our biological scale (multiples of even numbers). Higher primes seem more random because it's more unlikely that your goat will have 37 grandkids or your centipede 37 legs.
ignoring fifty is a bad action, it is one of the most round number in the range, which is common, so most people would think is a commonly choose number, even if it is well known that random number means non even for some reason for humans, also no multiple of five.
I asked this question on FB and 37 was the first number given. I also had a lot of 27, 57, and 77 but it was the FIRST number selected. I did use a blue background so maybe I cheated lol
There is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number. 1 is interesting as the multiplicative identity, 2 is also interesting as the only even prime. So assume N is an uninteresting. It would therefore be the first uninteresting number, which is interesting which creates a contradiction. QED. 37 is interesting, just not magical.
the problem with the rejection vs accepting analysis is not the math, the math is fine, but the issue is application to real decisions, in the real world we cannot look at 2 billion partners before choosing lol, we have some general idea of what we want and who we like, and we have to run with it at some point so it is just no cleanly applicable to the real world :P.
The day before Veritasium posted this video I used 37 as a random number in a silly post. Didn't think about it at all it's just the number I "randomly" used. Could be coincidence but seeing this video right after definitely made me feel silly
It seems to me this is more of certain people wanting a mundane thing to be more interesting than it actually is. Kind of a Face pareidolia type thing.
yeah, I think all the shenanigans shown in this video just distract from the real reason people choose 37 so much. A lot of people will just accept these explanations and not look further :/
37:00 “Why isn’t this video 37 minutes long” said at the 37th minute mark
o mah gawd
Holy shit
I noticed that too, that was a nice touch. I doubt it was by accident.
THIS COMmENT HAS 137 LIkeS
"For those of you who are programs.." *me sweating electrons* hes on to us
😂😂
We’re all electrons…I think?
1337 reactor power you mean ~LEET reactor power?
That "magic trick" restricts the choices to 8 possibilities: 13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, and 39. He then mentions 19, 17, and 15, psychologically priming the audience into not picking those three numbers. People also have an aversion to picking multiples of 5 as being "random", whereas they like to pick 7, as it seems the most random to people. The likelihood of picking 37 is very high.
hehe yes I commented similar - and indeed the magician/mentalist will have an 'out' for the other numbers, in exactly the same way that veritassium only showed the video where the audience gave the right answer! If the video is made for mystic numerology entertainment , fine , but he certainly pretends to be a scientist
I thought the number was decided beforehand, basically the whole "it's an odd number, not the same" was the magician "reading the mind" of the participant
I picked 5. Lol
69 as a number may be special too if we weren't all 12 years old lol
I just consider it to be a "funny number" like 42, 420, 69420, and 42069. Just that small release of brain chemicals when you see it is oh so satisfying.
As a programmer you could say a 'random number by choice' could be a seed number. So basically the number you give to a random number generator to derive its 'random' number sequence from
Or just the number put in a static number in place of the random one for debugging, to be absolutely sure the rest of the code around it runs as it should
For many stores, a price ending in 7 means the item is discontinued
The x.99 pricing isn't about aesthetics, it's about tricking the brain into thinking something is more significantly cheaper than it actually is. People are significantly more likely to buy something for 1.99 than for 2.00 because our brains put more weight on the first digit for efficiency in estimation. So your brain can see 1.99, 2.99 and 5.99 and estimate a total cost of 8 instead of nearly 11. When you're shopping, it's a good idea to round these up and say in your head the rounded up price to break that efficiency pattern your brain uses.
There's a whole complex psychology associated with pricing, and some retailers have been notorious for using this to the point of it being a code. Ending in 00 gets your attention because it's so rare. Ending in 98 is something a few do to stand out in ads while still getting the lower number brain trick. And some have numbers they go to only for clearance prices (88, for example) that they use consistently so customers get the idea that there's not going to be a lower price if they wait.
Regarding the programming random number of choice - The Jargon File is absolutely FILLED with jokes like that. I've worked as a software developer since the late 90s and I've never heard this "random number of choice" before today, but there are countless similar jokes from The Jargon File that permeate programming culture.
While I've not heard this particular one before, it's immediately obvious to me what the joke is. There is no random in programming. Period. We are using deterministic systems that have consistent outcomes from consistent inputs. Any perceived inconsistency comes from hidden inputs, whether that's cosmic rays causing a single event upset or a bad chip introducing electrical noise. We fake random by taking hard to notice inputs like time or combination of large input sets. For example, if you set the date and time in Minesweeper to a specific second, then generate a new map on that second, you can know exactly what all the tiles are. In normal play the seconds keep ticking so you seemingly don't get the same result twice, making it an easy hidden number for programmers to start from.
For "true random" we have to ask hardware that measures quantum effects to give us. Which is still an open question to whether that's truly random either. It could be the universe simulation using its own clock timestamp to determine quantum noise, for all we know. Though as a programmer, I can firmly answer that we statistically should not expect to live in a simulation. The physicists looking at it are basing it on things like the holographic principle, but in computer terms that only gets you memory with no access (ie. just the M out of RAM), resolution (you're using resolution in holography as alternative storage to depth so resolution is inherently lost) or processing (you're using all the space for storage). You can nest simulations but it rapidly becomes less capable with each layer, meaning that no, there aren't statistically more consciousnesses living in a simulation as some experts in the wrong fields to be saying such things assert. We could easily live in a holographic universe as you can shift the resolution outside the scale of our perception (which is also what conformal cyclic cosmology hinges on) but you can't do that with simulating the universe because you need to perceive the resolution to be able to use it for the simulation, meaning a rapidly narrowing band of resolution that can't be subdivided within the simulation. And even if you throw an infinity or five into it, you still end up with a proportion of real to simulated that is heavily weighted to real.
5:59 1337 has some meaning if you played games or hung out in chatrooms in the late 90s or early 2000s. Your brain probably highlights that each time you have seen it on guages in the plant or something.
I really wish you went back and watched the blue LED Veritasium video, it was one of his best ever but you just skipped reacting to that one
I filled out his form and i actually picked 37 as the most random, and 40 as the least random
surviorship bias
@MrTweetyhack I survived the randomness test and all I got was this lousy comment(mine, not yours if that wasn't clear lol)
I'll be honest and say that it's unlikely I'd pick a 7 type number for either answer.
The only way it would happen is if I was being led to that answer.
@ArtisChronicles I'm sure. I just found out that I fell into that same sort of bias. I don't agree with everything in the video, it's definitely sensationalized, but I do believe that people have a false sense of what is inherently random. I only really commented originally because I thought it was funny that I fell for the "false randomness" bias that a lot of other people did as well
@@kinexkidOfc it is sensationalized to some degree, all of Veritasiums videos are, but that is exactly why his channel are so popular, but at the same time he still manage to do it in a way it is not entirely false. The fact of the matter is raw science is boring for the vast vast majority of people, so if you want the results out there, you need to sensationalize it somewhat, and I do think Veritasium strikes a good balance there in general
...and also.... a human being farts 37 times... a day... [Veritasium's theme music starts playing]
I saw a community post that said that this poll he made was actually the largest random number data set ever which is quite the impressive record to casually achieve
Tyler I really appreciate your cynicism (for lack of a better word) and analysis of these testing methods and and results
skepticism would be the word i guess you wanted.
@@thorin1045 YES, thank you!
I think on a broader level, the Veritasium video shows people cannot be random or unbiased, even when especially trying to be.
5:02
While rejoicing for the right answer in view of the potential testing subjects
Oo ,I didn't consider that at first watch. Good point
Weird ngl, like, people that watch them do the "survey" will give the answer they want because it's the faster one to get through it. IG.
Your comment on his video not being 37 minutes at the 37 minute mark on this video. 🧐 well done.
Is there people hearing them freak out about 37?
"7" has a societal bias.... it's considered "lucky".
Less that it's esthetically pleasing, more that it's a common number seen and used alot as a reference to luck, and when people are guessing at something (anything) the natural assumption is that luck is in play, hence selecting "7".
37 is a number that looks very randomy, both part (3 and 7) is prime, it is a prime, but small enough to be considered. obviously the most random number between 1 and 100 is every single number in the range, as it is a single pick, but for humans that is not the norm to accept.
it was probably his 37th birthday when his mom gave him the $37
When you mentioned "1337 MW," I thought of Back To the Future, where 1210 ("one point 21 jigawatts...") is the necessary power for their time-travel!
19.99 is a common price because most people don't read or register the 99 cents part and see it as much lower than 20 bucks.
eh, I think nowadays most people recognize it as 20$. At least I do. I automatically find myself rounding a number when looking at a price, even when its something like 85cents. or 50 cents.
Veritasium also has a video on the 80/20 rule.
The number is really 42
hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy mentioned
Thank you for the fish.
Or Jackie Robinson number
Can we normalize on 'Veritasium' videos being a waste of time?
Like a broken clock, their articles are sometimes accurate.
But that's due more to coincidence than intention.
My birthday is 4,1,1987, I turned 37 the day this went live. this is actually not a joke.
I love your reactions🎉
This just shows how complex the human mind is and how much is there to it. Even the fact that you have mentioned the reactor power despite it being completely unconnected - construction of patterns.
And yet at the same time, how predictable we are as well, which is used and abused in so many ways
One of my first jobs out of high school was working for a guy I'll label a landscape architect because I'm not sure what his actual degree was. We were essentially turning many acres of parking lot into a botanical garden for tens of millions of dollars. His rules of thumb for making groupings of plants in numbers small enough count at a glance were: Avoid even numbers. Prefer primes. Prefer 3 and 7. If you have to break the rules, try to visually sub-group into groups that obey the rules. For example, if for some reason you must use 10 of the same small tree, perhaps put 3 higher up a hill and the other 7 lower down and probably skewed a bit left or right. He did also show us what it looks like when the rules are broken, like two clumps of four. Maybe I'm just suggestible, but it really did look better to me when his rules were followed. I would guess the rules might change for something like a formal English garden, but this was supposed to look like something like a natural area where humans stepped in to care for it, kinda like a Buddhist zen garden perhaps.
Oddly enough this brought back old memories from 7 being my favorite number back in school. It was even my jersey number in sports
I made a video response to Derek that involves a man caring a lot about the 7 on his jersey.
When someone asks me for a random number, I just use RNG. Otherwise, I personally always pick the smallest possible value (it won't be random anyway). Randomness is inherently counterintuitive to us, as we tend to look for patterns to read our environment. This is both a blessing and a curse.
There are a couple TED talks by a guy calling himself "Rivas" on 4 AM. The first one, he called out a number of 4 AM coincides and made up a whole conspiracy theory out of it. In the second one, he talks about all of the instances in media where 4 AM pops up and why 4 AM was on his mind for the first talk. I suspect that 4 AM suffers from the same thing that 7 and 37 do. 7 is the go to random value for 1-10. 37 is the go to random value for 1-100. And 4 AM is the go to random time for stupid o'clock at night.
Most random is colloquial for most unexpected.
I don't get the cynicism. It's not like he stated some mystical numerology as the reason, just an interesting psychological fact about numbers as to why we might choose or see 37 more commonly than others. Like how we see and make faces out of everything - random colloquially means 'sticks out' or seems improbable, so more expected or 'orderly' results don't stand out as much.
Plus a few fun facts and clickbait title to get engagement. People have done worse.
Like i get it, but I think it's a little silly to expect perfect scientific rigor to light hyperbole, as if they're making an objective universal statement. I don't think anyone's expecting that level from a psychology question about numbers.
What gets my goat is when people try to rationalize a hypothetical problem. Like, for the "how long should you wait to choose?" problem he laid out the parameters of the thought experiment: you get one final choice per item, and you don't know the items beforehand. That's it. The metaphor might be a little silly, but it's just as easy to come up with a reason someone can't turn around or research beforehand or just get gas at the first place, as it is to justify why Rose in your textbook needs to by 147 watermelons.
It's a minor gripe, but it's silly to question the parameters of the math question because the metaphor they used isn't realistic when taken literally.
... I say this because I had an issue with this for years. I didn't realize I had autism of some sort, and I took things too literally like jokes, or small talk, etc. I had to learn at some point that it's silly of me to expect perfect literal rationale in everyday language, and it's my responsibility to do a little translation in my head where I can before I ask everyone to correct themselves at all times for minor things.
That kind of thing. Maybe others have a different opinion. But I really enjoyed the video and the reaction.
37 haunts me to this day
Just clicked on this video 37 minutes after posting... 37 is everywhere
The reason they do $19.99 is to get as close to $20 without saying $20. Most people still see it as $19 and some change.
I've been using the party trick of making people choose 37 "at random" many times over many years (not too often, maybe once a year). You need to ask them to pick only odd numbers, and they can't be the same. About 9 out of 10 will say 37, because it seems so random to them. Just an anecdote.
I'm fine with people selecting 37 rather often when asked to pick random numbers, maybe there's some psychology behind that, but I agree the finding of real life examples is reaching. Somebody intentionally looking for a certain number, of course it will appear seemingly everywhere.
No number can be more facinating then 42, after all its the answer for the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
When i finished watching this, this video was out for 37 min. I also answered 37 to that forum.
Hey, loving the channel so far! The example with the gas stations isn't really meant to be a 1:1 comparison with real life - it's just game theory. But on a broader scale - we do move through life in one way only and in some sense, every decision you make is final. Accepting a job offer is final in the sense that you can't go back to the same time and accept a different job if you don't like the one you started first. Even if the other job offers are still on the table, you did spend X time working at a place and that cannot be undone. It might not matter that much if it's in the same field, but imagine the same logic applied to someone who is just figuring out what field they would like to go into.
edit - to your questions at around 25:00 - you can imagine that each gas station has a value 'quality' between 1 and the number of stations. You don't know that value for all of them beforehand, you can only discover it once you are at the station and compare it to the previous stations you've seen, and you can't go back.
I just found out there is a new Zelda game, so I finally restarted Breath of the Wild after my old Nintendo broke. I caught a horse; named it Appltater. I've playing Zelda for 37 years.
3,7 and 9 seems most random. We learn, even before school, to count by 1,2,5 and 10. Even numbers somehow seem natural. When having to memorize the multiplication table, I seem to remember 7 and 9s being the hardest.
this guy had only a few thousand subs, now hes almost at 100k. its nice to see people actually want to learn and listen to some nuclear engineer watch a 41 year old guy talk about 37
3.7 rontgen...
Video was so close to being 37 minutes long.
the is in fact an equation that can precisely give the nth prime but it is slow for even a computer to do
They did mention it had some importance as a counting value in a way similar to for example phi, but after that I don't think it is really that important. What was interesting is the regularity of the predictions.
If you really want to pick the most random number. Don’t think.
Derek must get damn hungry on roadtrips passing by all the gas stations figuring out which one is the best option for buying a sandwich.
Speaking of randomness probability and statistics, I'd really like to see your reaction to a good video on the Monty Hall problem
What I find wild and mindboggling about primes is that you can have an arbitrarily large gap between them, AND that there are also inifinitely many twin primes, ie primes with only one number between them (twin prime conjecture isnt proven I think, but likely to be true). Those two facts both being true is completely insane to me, that you can choose as large a number you want, literally as impossibly huge as you can imagine, a number so large it makes Graham's number look puny if you want, and there *will* at some point in the numberline be a gap of that size between primes (in fact infinitely many such gaps or larger), while at the same time there are infinitely many occurances on the numberline where there is only one number between two primes. That to me is mindblowing, but perhaps my mind is easily blown.
2:30 that is really important. So many studies is Proof of something, but when You lift up the rooks, look at the questions - it's obvious why that answer was given. How you ask a question, in which context and to how many is more interesting then the final results (if their is a questionable results).
The $19.99 thing is because psychologically it seems cheaper then $20 even though it’s usually automatically rounded to the same number.
Well if you are paying with cash at least. If you play with card it usually is on the dot. Which has made me think sometimes, like if you do it consistently over a lifetime, you could probably save quite a bit of money if you make sure to pay in cash when the final price of your shopping is rounded down, and with card, if it would otherwise be rounded up (that can often be a lot of other numbers than just .99 due to adding together from multiple wares). But it also is way too tedious and the benefit would be a looooooong time one, in the moment you would not feel it, which makes it so much harder to justify doing it to yourself
I watched the original video. Going in, I was really excited. I thought there was going to be some interesting numerology, or mathematical deductions. I found the original video unconvincing, and a waste of time. I'm glad you did a reaction, and minimally, ended up in the same, unconvinced boat as me.
this is my comment i left on the Veritassium channel:
Another clickbaity one from Veritasium. Yes most of the videos are fun and amazing but occasionally we get this kind of thing.
Veritassium - 37 is "Humanity's number of choice" - in that case - can we do a video for each number "Why do we see the number 1 everywhere... why do we see the number 15 everywhere" etc.
The utility function of waiting for the first the first 37 (but not actually 37) percent of opportunities to pass before picking the next best one is tenuous at best. A lot of this is just chance and wouldn't apply if we weren't using base 10.
Showing images of the number 37 on house doors or road signs with spooky music doesn't make it any more significant then any other number. Professor Ray Hyman does a lot of work on this kind of thing, where we see significance in things like numbers - especially when it's presented in a spooky way within the context of it giving more meaning to our lives. He investigated mystics, and it seems that this Veritasium guy is getting good at blending the pseudoscience with the mysticism. Maybe he is running out of ideas.
Oh its not really scientific to remove 1, 2, 99, 100, 42 , 69 etc just because 'outliers' Another clickbaity one from Veritasium. Yes most of the videos are fun and amazing but occasionally we get this kind of thing. Can we do a video for each number "Why do we see the number 1 everywhere... why do we see the number 15 everywhere" etc. The utility function of waiting for the first the first 37 (but not actually 37) percent of opportunities to pass before picking the next best one is tenuous at best. A lot of this is just chance and wouldn't apply if we weren't using base 10. Showing images of the number 37 on house doors or road signs with spooky music doesn't make it any more significant then any other number. Professor Ray Hyman does a lot of work on this kind of thing, where we see significance in things like numbers - especially when it's presented in a spooky way within the context of it giving more meaning to our lives. He investigated mystics, and it seems that this Veritasium guy is getting good at blending the pseudoscience with the mysticism. Maybe he is running out of ideas.
Oh its not really scientific to remove 1, 2, 99, 100, 42 , 69 etc (and 73 for that matter) just because 'outliers' or whatever - and then to remove, 73 , 7, 77 (with the spooky music in the background)
And the magicians "force" to 37 is just that, a force. He is scripting to eliminate all the other numbers to leave a potential 3 or 4 to choose from (he will have an outcome for any of these), and then the one chosen for this video is 37 in any case - often these mentalists / magicians wont get the the number 37
Its also designed so that if we 'complain' about the science, he can retort that its just fun
I guess your comment got deleted/ hidden by them?
3:48 keep calm and keep looking, it's going to be explained
You can never forget, (though an approximation) the value of Alpha a.k.a. Fine Structure Constant xD
That one random Spanish commercial where the number was 7777777777
Hello 37:37
If you wait, you will hear “37 is out there”
29:45 I'd argue that 33 cents would sell way better, as it's 3 pieces for a dollar. But it's also over 10% cheaper, so that plays a role too
I like 37, and I have for a long time, because it is itself prime, and both constituent numbers are also prime.
Numbers are for the most part fascinating.
Numerology always makes me loose interest completely.
Beyond that its fun to discover patterns and more. Also how numbers affect you in different ways. I tend to react more to the time 13:37 but only because of growing up with 90s hollywood hacker movies and being a computer geek. I have no other connection to that numbers.
Also, picking 69 when asked for a number feels boring. Not much creativity or thinking outside the box with those people i guess. Even if its a automatic quick response it still says a lot about the person.
this. Veritassium resorting to numerology under a pretend scientific umbrella
So you are saying the future affects the past?
Language is notoriously fuzzy, so I think the reason you can say "the most random number" and be understood and provided with a statistically significant answer is that 'random' has a colloquial definition of "strange or unpredictable" stemming from how humans typically react to phenomena that are recognisably random.
I think primes seem more random because they only exist as multiples of one or products of higher numbers: so they don't come into existence like most things in our lives. They don't grow like we expect things to do at our biological scale (multiples of even numbers). Higher primes seem more random because it's more unlikely that your goat will have 37 grandkids or your centipede 37 legs.
8:33 did You see that (blue)42 was on there for us nerds to smile about... I did
My NEC(navy version of mos) was 1337
After 37 minutes, I didn't keep watching this video....
ignoring fifty is a bad action, it is one of the most round number in the range, which is common, so most people would think is a commonly choose number, even if it is well known that random number means non even for some reason for humans, also no multiple of five.
Poor Dante Hicks...... 37 but not in a row
ya i remember back in the late 90's early 2000's LeeT or "1337" speak XD
This guy is like Jim Carey in The Number 23
Would like someone to keep up a fixation like that with numbers with more digits :P
This reminds me of the film 'The Number 23'
I asked this question on FB and 37 was the first number given. I also had a lot of 27, 57, and 77 but it was the FIRST number selected. I did use a blue background so maybe I cheated lol
(26:24) Reminds the _Poisson distribution_
Everybody can count in base six using their fingers, from 0 to 35, 36 values, one short of 37. Coincidence ? :D
There is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number. 1 is interesting as the multiplicative identity, 2 is also interesting as the only even prime. So assume N is an uninteresting. It would therefore be the first uninteresting number, which is interesting which creates a contradiction. QED. 37 is interesting, just not magical.
Completely skeptical.
Justified. Look here for another reason to be skeptical on the 37 video.
the problem with the rejection vs accepting analysis is not the math, the math is fine, but the issue is application to real decisions, in the real world we cannot look at 2 billion partners before choosing lol, we have some general idea of what we want and who we like, and we have to run with it at some point so it is just no cleanly applicable to the real world :P.
The day before Veritasium posted this video I used 37 as a random number in a silly post. Didn't think about it at all it's just the number I "randomly" used. Could be coincidence but seeing this video right after definitely made me feel silly
Sounds like numerology.
who cares about 37.
the really important number is 1/137
pauli was a gread fan of it.
he even died in a hospice in room 137.
Agree! That's the most interesting number
Can you review Minecraft mod named SuperSymmetry. It’s about realistic industrialization and it’s one of the most realistic Minecraft mod packs
7 is very biblical, so this has been around a while
This is a comment with 37 characters.
It seems to me this is more of certain people wanting a mundane thing to be more interesting than it actually is. Kind of a Face pareidolia type thing.
yeah, I think all the shenanigans shown in this video just distract from the real reason people choose 37 so much. A lot of people will just accept these explanations and not look further :/
Watch "Hexagons are the bestagons"
8:23 Programmer here, nope, not a thing.
42
3
7 is also not random
42 :)
You know u asked why the video isnt 37 min long at the same time this(ur) video was at 37 minutes.. 😮
I picked 5.
Baloney.
In a row?
1337 = LEET (Elite?) 😀