I would consider myself smarter than at least 95% of people and I couldn’t complete the egg problem even with a piece of paper, much less without. I think Eliezer massively overestimates the ability of the average person to do mental math.
Well, intelligence doesn’t equate skills. It’s probably easier to aquire skills (like mental maths) with high intelligence, but no matter the intelligence, you still need to learn it.
P(easy learning | high intelligence) may be higher than P(easy learning | not high intelligence) for a given subject (f.e. mental math),
but P(mental math) is not dependent on the ease of learning [P(mental math | no easy learning) would be low] but rather on actually learning/training it:
P(mental math | no learning) is pretty low.
So people who learn mental math may have different speeds or difficulty doing so, however I would guess that it is more dependent on educational context, curiosity, or need(,...), rather than ease of learning.
But, if your self-assessment is correct, and my mentioned assumptions are as well, you should be able to remedy the predicament relatively easily ;)
The individual calculations of the egg question seem within the realm of what most people can do to me. It’s possible others might have trouble keeping multiple numbers in mind at once, though. - multiply 30% with 40% (which can be simplified in a number of ways) - multiply 10% with 60% - add 6% + 12% - divide 12 by 18
It’s probably easier to aquire skills (like mental maths) with high intelligence, but no matter the intelligence, you still need to learn it.
Also, I’m not sure this is fully true. Personally, learning math was enough to automatically start doing it mentally, and I never needed to specifically try to learn it.
I would consider myself smarter than at least 95% of people and I couldn’t complete the egg problem even with a piece of paper, much less without. I think Eliezer massively overestimates the ability of the average person to do mental math.
Well, intelligence doesn’t equate skills. It’s probably easier to aquire skills (like mental maths) with high intelligence, but no matter the intelligence, you still need to learn it.
P(easy learning | high intelligence) may be higher than P(easy learning | not high intelligence) for a given subject (f.e. mental math), but P(mental math) is not dependent on the ease of learning [P(mental math | no easy learning) would be low] but rather on actually learning/training it: P(mental math | no learning) is pretty low.
So people who learn mental math may have different speeds or difficulty doing so, however I would guess that it is more dependent on educational context, curiosity, or need(,...), rather than ease of learning.
But, if your self-assessment is correct, and my mentioned assumptions are as well, you should be able to remedy the predicament relatively easily ;)
The individual calculations of the egg question seem within the realm of what most people can do to me. It’s possible others might have trouble keeping multiple numbers in mind at once, though.
- multiply 30% with 40% (which can be simplified in a number of ways)
- multiply 10% with 60%
- add 6% + 12%
- divide 12 by 18
Also, I’m not sure this is fully true. Personally, learning math was enough to automatically start doing it mentally, and I never needed to specifically try to learn it.