How to Think Like a Genius 9— Precision
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What I’m gathering from what you’re saying is that concepts are more important than precision or that the precision with which you can explain a concept that you observe or conceive is more important.
Rick Rosner: It is getting hard to imagine situations in which you’re entirely on your own when you’re trying to figure out what is going on. I do a lot of mental math because I’ve got OCD in that direction. I’ve worked on my estimation skills. I can look at a flock of birds and get within 10/15% of the birds within the flock by doing Rain Man stuff.
Though, Rain Man would break things down into groups and clusters. There’s a scene where Rain man counts 246 toothpicks that have fallen out of some container, and he did it by breaking it into 82 groups of three, the falling toothpicks. I can’t do that, but I can count by clusters, which I think he was pretty good at, but there aren’t many instances in which knowing how many birds are flying over your head is very helpful.
Though we did take a family trip and I did get crapped on by a bird, and the bird estimation did help me develop a good model for the odds of getting crapped on, and the odds of getting crapped on twice in my life to the amount of time on average that there’s a bird directly over me. I forget what the math was. Maybe, it was one five thousandth of the time. Again, not the most helpful thing, better to know how to Google really well.
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