[White Night Talk] Under what circumstances does 6+7 equal 12

Although my personal experience has not yet supported me in writing “Unlock 6”, my colleagues’ experiences always make me feel like this: “White Night Talk” is very similar to a confession room or confessional room in a church, which is suitable for reflection. Your own fault, question your own soul.

The entire process of confession is fair and open, in contrast to the tradition of the confessional. But these days, the role of “sister” has been cyberized, and those who are willing to publicly “repent” in cyberspace don’t seem to care about exposing dark history to the world.

因为扮成修女直播意外走红的Twitch主播Niki Twitch streamer Niki who accidentally became popular because she was a nun

In short, today is my turn to repent, and the content of my repentance is: I don’t know how to count.

I’ve got numbers wrong in my manuscript no less than ten times since I started working. Either there was an error in the calculation, or the two items of data for the side-by-side comparison were mixed up. In more cases, I did not understand the 0 behind the large number, and I put millions into tens of millions, and billions into tens of billions.

在换算货币的时候最容易出这种问题 This problem is most likely to occur when converting currencies

Every time I make a mistake, I have to harass the editor at the first time, and the editor takes the trouble to accept it and correct it without blaming me at all. Two days ago, the manuscript was wrong again, and I felt really sorry for it, so I added a sentence in the conversation, “Or I will write a white night talk about it if I don’t know how to count it.”

The editor immediately told a story to comfort me. A few years ago, the seniors of the two content groups had to calculate a binary linear equation to calculate the tax on the royalties. The two of them calculated two different results, and they fought for an entire afternoon. In the end they brought in another colleague to arbitrate, and it turned out that both had miscalculated.

我不记得这个公式是干什么的了,只记得它救过我的命 I don’t remember what this formula was for, just that it saved my life

He’s presumably giving up on the math level of the content group. But I still feel that the problems that happened to me were not just math problems. Mistakes in numbers are serious inaccuracies in the realm of journalism and must be corrected promptly and firmly. I have plenty of time to check articles, re-deduce and calculate numbers, but ignore low-level mistakes in each check and regret it later.

This reminds me again that at a certain time in high school, I often miscalculated 6+7 as 12. Even if I checked the test paper in every possible way, I could not find my mistake. And when I was learning Python language programming in college (a required course for journalism majors), I once spent hours trying to figure out why the program I wrote couldn’t work, until my roommate came over to review it for a minute and changed it for me. a punctuation mark.

6+7 is of course equal to 12 only in case of miscalculation. So, why does it go wrong? Internet search results seemed to excuse me, leading to a simple psychological term: “Attention Illusion”
Illusion).

Research on the “attention illusion” began with a classic psychological experiment in 1999. The researchers showed a video of a group of college students dressed in black and white playing ball, and asked test subjects to record “how many times the person in white passed the ball.”

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After the video was over and the question was answered, the researchers suddenly asked a second question: Did you see a passing gorilla in the video? There is indeed a researcher wearing a gorilla costume in the video, walking slowly through the playing crowd, and even thumping his chest for the camera, so obvious that it was ignored by nearly half of the test subjects.

Several experiments, including the “gorilla” experiment, were included in their 2010 book “The Invisible Gorilla” by American psychologists Daniel Simons and Chris Chobris. Verify the existence of the “attention illusion”:

When human attention is highly concentrated, some information or things that are not paid attention to will be filtered out by our brain involuntarily. “Even if you know that some unexpected situation may arise, it will not help you discover other unexpected situations.”

“Attention illusions” have their positive meaning, such as letting me ignore things that are not related to work, such as push advertisements on web pages, avoid distractions, and increase productivity. But the disadvantage is also obvious, that is, when I focus on exams, writing code, thinking about writing, I will ignore the low-level mistakes made again and again.

According to this theory, the limited human attention will always lead us to selectively ignore something, so the question that haunts me seems unsolved.

But in that experiment, as long as the researchers revealed any information about the “gorilla” in advance, it was impossible for the test subjects to miss the passing orangutan.

My work makes it impossible for me to reconcile with this issue. I used the stupidest method, and wrote the words “pay attention to the numbers” on my mobile phone note, so as to remind myself when reviewing the manuscript with my mobile phone, and turn my attention to the error-prone parts.

This doesn’t necessarily prevent mistakes, and may make mistakes elsewhere because of distraction, but at least it makes my heart feel a little better.

年近40的凯撒在画漫画时摸鱼推导一元二次方程的求根公式。——CaesarZX Caesar, who was nearly 40 years old, was trying to find the root formula of the quadratic equation in one variable while drawing cartoons. -CaesarZX

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