This is like the question, “Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?”
The question is, would you rather have a blue pearl egg from the first or second barrel?
You know that this hypothetical egg is blue. And has a pearl in it. It doesn’t matter which barrel the egg is from because these are the only dimensions along which eggs vary.
Hahaha, yeah. Well that was slightly embarassing. My brain just didn’t bother parsing the actual question, just assumed I’m being asked about blue eggs again.
What’s scary is that I thought I carefully re-read the problem after I noticed I’m unsure I understand it, and I still didn’t see it; I just paid even more attention to the %s.
The traditional even-more-stupidly-clever answer to that is that a pound of feathers weighs more, because precious metals are measured in troy pounds rather than avoirdupois pounds.
Nice. If I were to try to give one like that to the barrels problem, I’d say “barrel 2 please”, because that way, if afterwards I’m asked to choose a barrel to get a random blue egg after all, I won’t have shot myself in the foot by lowering the favorable odds from barrel 1..
This is like the question, “Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?”
The question is, would you rather have a blue pearl egg from the first or second barrel?
You know that this hypothetical egg is blue. And has a pearl in it. It doesn’t matter which barrel the egg is from because these are the only dimensions along which eggs vary.
Hahaha, yeah. Well that was slightly embarassing. My brain just didn’t bother parsing the actual question, just assumed I’m being asked about blue eggs again.
What’s scary is that I thought I carefully re-read the problem after I noticed I’m unsure I understand it, and I still didn’t see it; I just paid even more attention to the %s.
The traditional even-more-stupidly-clever answer to that is that a pound of feathers weighs more, because precious metals are measured in troy pounds rather than avoirdupois pounds.
Nice. If I were to try to give one like that to the barrels problem, I’d say “barrel 2 please”, because that way, if afterwards I’m asked to choose a barrel to get a random blue egg after all, I won’t have shot myself in the foot by lowering the favorable odds from barrel 1..