I just briefly skimmed your answer (trying not to actually engage with it enough to figure out the problem or your thought process), and then went and looked at the problem.
I got the answer B. The reason I went with B is that (especially contrasted with other illustrations in the book), the problem looks like it’s going out of it’s way to signal that the squares are regular enough that they are trying to convey “this is the same relative size.”
I think there’s not going to be an objective answer here – sometimes, graphs without units are complete bullshit, or on a logscale, or with counterintuitive units or whatever. Sometimes, they are basically what they appear-at-first-glance to be.
instead I did a 90-80-2 split across these, getting it ‘wrong’ when the answer was deemed to be b.
Does this mean you assignd ~49% on B? (not 100% sure how to parse this)
The way I approach Thinking Physics problems is
a) I do assume I am trying to guess what the author thought, which does sometimes mean psychologizing (this is sort of unfortunate but also not that different from most real world practical examples, where you often get a task that depends on what other people think-they-meant, and you have to do a mix of “what is the true underlying territory” and “am I interpreting the problem correct?”
b) whenever there are multiple things I’m uncertain of (“what does ‘pressure’ mean?”, “what does the author mean by ‘pressure’?) I try to split those out into multiple probabilities
Nod. I think I would basically argue that wasn’t really a reasonable probability to give the second option. (When I thought it was 90/80/2 I was like “okay well that’s close to 50⁄50 which feels like a reasonable guess for the authorial intent as well as, in practice, what you can derive from unlabeled graphs.”)
I just briefly skimmed your answer (trying not to actually engage with it enough to figure out the problem or your thought process), and then went and looked at the problem.
I got the answer B. The reason I went with B is that (especially contrasted with other illustrations in the book), the problem looks like it’s going out of it’s way to signal that the squares are regular enough that they are trying to convey “this is the same relative size.”
I think there’s not going to be an objective answer here – sometimes, graphs without units are complete bullshit, or on a logscale, or with counterintuitive units or whatever. Sometimes, they are basically what they appear-at-first-glance to be.
Does this mean you assignd ~49% on B? (not 100% sure how to parse this)
The way I approach Thinking Physics problems is
a) I do assume I am trying to guess what the author thought, which does sometimes mean psychologizing (this is sort of unfortunate but also not that different from most real world practical examples, where you often get a task that depends on what other people think-they-meant, and you have to do a mix of “what is the true underlying territory” and “am I interpreting the problem correct?”
b) whenever there are multiple things I’m uncertain of (“what does ‘pressure’ mean?”, “what does the author mean by ‘pressure’?) I try to split those out into multiple probabilities
Whoops, that was a typo—corrected the probability now in the thread, & thanks, that’s helpful
Nod. I think I would basically argue that wasn’t really a reasonable probability to give the second option. (When I thought it was 90/80/2 I was like “okay well that’s close to 50⁄50 which feels like a reasonable guess for the authorial intent as well as, in practice, what you can derive from unlabeled graphs.”)