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#randomness#probability#humanbias

Why is this number everywhere?

Veritasium

21M subscribers • 25 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Derek Muller, creator of Veritasium

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

12M views2 years ago2 recommendations

Computer scienceMath for programmersClassic machine learning

Derek Muller explores human cognitive biases in generating random numbers, explaining why the number 37 is chosen so frequently.

The number 37 is on your mind more than you think. Head to brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial and get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Huge thanks to Tom Magliery for sharing his 37 collection with us. Support thirty-seven.org by sharing your own 37 sightings to tom@thirty-seven.org! Thanks to Dr. Todd Landman, the Academic Magician, for sharing his footage of the 37 Force. - todd-landman.com/ ▀▀▀ Special thanks to our Patreon supporters! Join the community to help us keep our videos free, forever: ve42.co/PatreonDE Sam Lutfi, Lee Redden, Juan Benet, Richard Sundvall, Paul Peijzel, Gnare, Michael Krugman, Meekay, Ubiquity Ventures, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Bill Linder, Evgeny Skvortsov, Burt Humburg, Dave Kircher, Diffbot, john kiehl, Blake Byers, Stephen Wilcox, John H. Austin, Jr., Josh Hibschman, TTST, Orlando Bassotto, Anton Ragin, David Johnston, KeyWestr, Tj Steyn, meg noah, Chris Harper, Adam Foreman, Max Paladino, Balkrishna Heroor, I. H., Garrett Mueller, Bertrand Serlet, Kyi, wolfee, Matthias Wrobel If you’re looking for a molecular modeling kit, try Snatoms, a kit I invented where the atoms snap together magnetically - ve42.co/SnatomsV ▀▀▀ References: Simon, W. E. (1972). “Blue Seven Phenomenon” in Elementary and Jr. High Children. Psychological Reports - ve42.co/Simon1972 Trueman, J. (1979). Existence & Robustness of Blue Seven Phenomena. The Journal of General Psychology - ve42.co/Trueman1979 Saito, M. (1999). “Blue and Seven Phenomena” in Japanese Students. Perceptual & Motor Skills - ve42.co/Saito1999 Philbrick, J. L. (1976). Blue seven in East Africa: Preliminary report. Perceptual & Motor Skills - ve42.co/Philbrick1976 Hargreaves, S. (2009). The psychology of randomness. - ve42.co/Hargreaves2009 The 37 Force via The Magician’s Forum - ve42.co/37Force1 Fulves, K. (1979) Self-Working Mental Magic. Dover Publications, Inc. - ve42.co/Fulves1979 Random numbers via The Jargon File at catb.org - ve42.co/Jargon Random Number Survey by MahoganyForest via Reddit - ve42.co/RedditRndm Prime number theorem via Wikipedia - ve42.co/WikiPNT Grossack, C. (2023). A truly incredible fact about the number 37. Grossack.site - ve42.co/Grossack2023 Least prime factor of n via oeis.org - ve42.co/LeastPrime Fry, H. (2017). When should you settle down? ideas.ted.com - ve42.co/Fry2017 Choosing Toilets by Numberphile - youtube.com/watch?v=XIOoCKO-ybQ Seaton, R. (2014). The Secretary Problem Explained: Dating Mathematically. rs.io - ve42.co/Seaton2014 Images & Video: Just 37 by Tom Magliery - ve42.co/Just37 R4000 Processor via Molecular Expressions - ve42.co/micro37 The “37” Cluster by Noel Carboni - ve42.co/NGC2169 Charles Fleischer via Wikimedia - ve42.co/Fleischer ▀▀▀ Directed by Emily Zhang Written by Emily Zhang and Derek M

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its insights into human randomness bias, which is often compared to LLM probability distributions.

golergkaon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Thirty Seven”

Probably posted because of this video: link to this video Which not only links to this website, but also explains the topic in detail. Can highly recommend the channel anyway — especially for the HN crowd.
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mitch_fon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Ski Rental Problem”

Derek Muller did a good overview of this concept on his Veritasium channel: link to this video . Even more interesting for HN is a link in the description to one of the speaker's (Tom Magliery) websites: link .
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sdenton4on Hacker News • Mentions

On “The question that no LLM can answer and why it is important”

Wellll.... Watching that video now, it looks like the most-selected number in their poll of 200k people was 69, followed by 42. Once /those/ are eliminated, 37 and 73 stand out. link to this video
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unshavedyakon Hacker News • Mentions

On “LLMs can't do probability”

I assume somewhat related to this, but humans are also terrible at "random". ~See~ Related 371. The more we advance on LLMs the more i am convinced i'm an LLM. :s 1: link to this video
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sigmoid10on Hacker News • Mentions

On “LLMs can't do probability”

>You are a weighted random choice generator. About 80% of the time please say ‘left’ and about 20% of the time say ‘right’. Simply reply with left or right. Do not say anything else I could have told you these results solely based on the methodology combined with this system prompt. No need to spend money on APIs. Randomness in LLMs does not come from the context, it comes from sampling over output tokens the LLM considers likely. Imagine you are in this situation as a human: Someone walks up to you and tells you to say "left" with 80% probability and "right" with 20% probability. You say "left" and then the other person walks away never to be seen again. How do you determine if your own "ou…
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brabelon Hacker News • Mentions

On “LLMs can't do probability”

Those humans, really difficult to know what they're thinking! Anyway, humans are fairly predictable when trying to come up with random numbers, for example, have a look at this Veritasium video: link to this video
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knowitnoneon Hacker News • Mentions

On “'Hey Number 17 '”

according to vertasium 37 is link to this video and he monetized a whole video on it. Edit: his number range is 1-100 instead of 1-20 so different
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leakycapon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What Is the Funniest Number?”

Interesting that the funniest numbers also combine to become the most commonly made up numeric answer "Why is this number everywhere?" link to this video Veritasium, 2024
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lcnPylGDnU4H9OFon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Poker Tournament for LLMs”

I recall a video (I think it was Veritasium) which featured interviews of people specifically being asked to give a "random" number (really, the first one they think of as "random") between 1 and 50. The most common number given was 37. The video made an interesting case for why. (It was Veritasium but it was actually a number from 1 to 100, the most common number was 7 and the most common 2-digit number was 37: link to this video .)
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armchairhackeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask ChatGPT to pick a number from 1-10000, it generally selects from 7200-7500”

People use this as evidence that ChatGPT is unlike human thinking, but we also have a randomness bias: link to this video (referenced in one of the comments. tl;dr: when asked a number between 1-100, most pick a number with 7) But ChatGPT’s bias is worse. It’s really not creative, and I think this hurts its output in “creative” cases, including stock photos and paid writing (ex: ML-assisted ads are even worse than unassisted ads), although not an issue in other cases like programming. Now you may think - obviously that’s because the model has the same weights - but the problem is deeper and harder to solve. First, ChatGPT’s conversations are supposed to be “personalized”, presumably by putting users’ h…
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inditon Hacker News • Mentions

On “GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100”

I'm still amazed that 37, 73, and other numbers ending in 7 are the most popular "random" choices for both AI and human. Check this Veritasium video for human choice: Why is this number everywhere?( link to this video )
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