" Researchers asked 179 Canadian college students to answer the following three math questions:


1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? ____cents

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____minutes

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____days

These questions were taken from a study of 179 Canadian college students. After completing the quiz, the students were asked about their innate religiosity, religious beliefs, and beliefs in supernatural entities (like God, angels, and Satan).

The results?

The more religious the students were, the less likely they were to have demonstrated effective analytical reasoning on the three questions. Conversely, the better the students did on the questions, the less likely they were to have strong beliefs."

http://www.relativelyinteresti...n-predict-believe-god/

I don't get how there is a such thing as an "intuitive" vs analytical answer to these problems. You either do the math and get the answer or you don't and you don't.

OK children, have fun, but read the whole article before you go off on any rant tha it's an attack on religion or calling anybody stupid.


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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

The intuitive answer is the one that would fit on a bumper sticker.


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“It is the heart of US policy to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism “ - Michael Parenti

My $0.05  ha ha it's solution   x + (x+1) =1.1

 

IMHO it's the middle group that reject belief in a power bigger than them... i.e. the ones that are "smart" but not truly intelligent... I say that as some of the most intelligent people ( and trust me I've met a lot of smart folks being a PhD holding active researcher) I have ever met actually turned out to be believers. I geuss when you're really that smart you figure out we as humans just aren't really able to comprehend not control everything. Which is what I think some of the best scientists ever - Newtown, Einstein etc - who were believers in GOD came to conclude? 

 

But the study makes sense: its just saying young people with a decent mind are less likely to follow blindly and more likely to question challenge etc etc. I'm pretty sure that'll go for a lot more than religion... 

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get up early and go surf - it'll make that hangover go away and/or make the workday more tolerable :)

Edited: 07/26/2017 at 06:12 PM by surferclimber

Einstein called himself an agnostic, or a religious nonbeliever, but not an athiest.
He did not believe in an afterlife.

-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

I couldn't agree less. If there is a super God and he/she/it is petty enough to micro manage my life, it's not really a super being in my opinion. To me, modern religious rules are the equivalent of punishing the ants in your ant farm because they didn't do what you wanted them to do.

I have no need to control and comprehend everything; I have life and family to worry about.



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I was right.

 

I see you must have read Wikipedia as that is exactly what's written there...

 

What I was referring to - and I learned this story from a physics PhD co worker- is that after years of work Einstein came out and said something like there is no other answer than GOD created it or there is no way we can solve not understand these equations only GOD is capable to do so... 

 

 

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get up early and go surf - it'll make that hangover go away and/or make the workday more tolerable :)

 

Never said anything about religion... big difference between GOD and religion. Modern religion, or religious rules are just that rules created by humans  ( most of the time with agenda ). The idea of GOD and something bigger than us is completely different thing. I agree with "not needing to comprehend everything" as if there is a GOD looking at us, think of a boss, I am pretty sure he'd be much more appreciative of someone who was kind, did right and just got on with their life being a good person rather  than someone  who went around being all religious telling others what to do & judging etc etc especially all this crazy extremist stuff going on

 

 

 

 

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get up early and go surf - it'll make that hangover go away and/or make the workday more tolerable :)

I did pull those terms from the Wiki page, looking for the words he used, but I have also read a lot of what the man wrote. He was Jewish, but not religious. His idea of god is very unlike that from any religion, and he was smart enough to understand that we really can't comprehend god. He uses the term god in that way, god is the natural laws of the universe, a way to describe that which we don't (yet?) comprehend. He came the conclusion there was something more out there, but did not believe in a personal entity like a god that intervenes in our lives, gives us rules or that we should pray to.

I think he got this right.


-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

BTW, I'm way more interested in understanding the bit about "intuitive math" and how that correlates with belief than I am rehashing aspects of any faith here.

-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Okay, my bad, your wording sounded more like praise than explanation.

Were we created by something? Maybe. But does it really matter one way or the other?



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I was right.

Naught, naught, carry the naught..............................

I'm still working on the math questions since yesterday.

That reads like a believer's hopeful interpretation of Einstein's agnosticism.

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...

Get em Jethro!



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I was right.

"Intuitive math" seems like the tendency of people to take the first thing that pops into their head, something the imediately 'feels' right, and running with it.

My physics teacher in high school liked to have fun with intuition.

 

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...

You may want to look at the beliefs of some other scientists; not just Einstein (whose belief in "god" was not straightforward...probably agnostic as WG is arguing). Newton was a product of his age.

Not that I am an atheist, but I tend to like them and agnostics since they try to think.

Like those who intuitively know that AGW is a hoax.

I read an interesting article on the failure of science communication to the general public that stems from scientists tending to follow the "deficit model" of understanding and explanation. Scientists tend to seek new data when they become aware of a deficit in their own knowledge and then they extrapolate this into their communication wherein they think that supplying more facts will change public perception on some topic. This generally results in a fail.

I think this particular research is relevant to that topic.

I also read a cool paper on cognition yesterday about how stupid we all generally are because of the complexity of just about everything. We know what we know but there is collective knowledge that drive most processes. Even with something like a rocket launch. There's engineers that know how to build the engines and guidance systems but the successful launch requires somebody else to know the weather, some physicians to get things right when you are putting people on the vehicle, etc... No one person on the project ever has anything approaching total knowledge of all aspects of the project to make it work and that applies whether you are building and deploying a bomb, shooting people into space, buiding a high rise on a dredge spoil island in Dubai, etc...

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My experience with the opening post last night.

I was cooking dinner and glanced at the questions. The intuitive answer immediately popped into my head on the first reading followed by "wait a minute". I got up to put the bread in the oven and had the correct answer before I sat back down, but I did have to pause to cypher through.

Even on the plant question you'd think that I'd immediately get it correct without thought given my experience with population dynamics. But I still had to breifly pause and think about daily doubling. My brain had an initial hickup on that one because we were given neither the size of the pond or the starting percent coverage of the plants from which my brain wanted to project forward rather that the super short step of cutting any N acres in half in one day from total cover to half cover.

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Yeah, its like being on a diet. The eat-food brain tries to take over. The irony of being human; always fighting off alligator and ape brain. (Except when you can let it out such as when you are up and riding).