Weber's Law - Numberphile

[@VulpeculaJoy]

Whether you get attacked by 1 or 2 lions is a huge difference but when it's 20 or 21 the difference doesn't matter that much anymore...

[@Nalianna]

How many bullet holes did the victim have? 1? 2? precise numbers. 40? couple dozen?

[@AJoe-ze6go]

Actually, one or two doesn't matter that much if you're unarmed.

[@bigbeans202]

The direct quote from VSauce is actually 100 vs. 101

[@infernape716]

@@bigbeans202 actually it's 96 vs 97

[@IIISentorIII]

lol

[@MrSleazey]

I almost spit my tea on my keyboard when the notice appeared about “Available to film weddings...” appeared! Best laugh I’ve had all week! Thanks!

[@dummyvariable3079]

0:58 How much of Brady is out of frame before you can tell the difference?

[@lodgin]

You could probably test for that. It's like CGPGrey's video on death. I did not realise the screen was being decayed until it was almost covered.

[@phiefer3]

to be honest, at that part it took me a little while to realize he was even in the frame.

[@gabor6259]

Dummy Variable, best name ever. :)

[@redbeam_]

@John Smith which one?

[@felipevasconcelos6736]

John Smith, I didn’t even realize it until I rewatched it after reading your comment.

[@AJoe-ze6go]

The application of Weber's Law to the perception of the passage of time as one ages is a profound insight. Thank you.

[@ChemEDan]

How is it after 3yrs?

[@AJoe-ze6go]

@@ChemEDan Accelerating :)

[@user-Orkb186-3]

It's not profound at all. When you are 2, 1 year is 50%of your life. When you are 10, 1 year is only 10% of your life. When you are my age, one year is an insignificant amount of my life.

[@AJoe-ze6go]

@@user-Orkb186-3 I don't think that just because something seems obvious in retrospect, it's not profound. It's been said that simplicity is the hallmark of brilliance, and this seems to me to be a perfect example of that.

[@advenco344]

@@AJoe-ze6goWell said!

[@Emanator022]

"Hannah is available to film weddings and corporate events"

[@heisenberg2712]

I know XD

[@marctelfer6159]

I saw that, lost it, and had to rewind :P

[@wolfymilk]

I love Brady's snark

[@invisibledave]

It's Hannah's version of a Parker square.

[@pablom9223]

My sides hurt from laughing from that 😂

[@zZrEtRiBuTiOnZz]

"Is what you're filming vaguely usable?" 😂

[@Earthcomputer]

I think this applies to numbers as well. That's why people perceive 2 to be quite a bit larger than 1 and but 1000 is not much larger than 999

[@Earthcomputer]

2 of anything. 2 people, 2 apples etc

[@connorp3030]

When studying aboriginal cultures when asked how much larger a 2 is then 1 and 3 an 2 etc they draw a logarithmic curve, so do children before they've been taught that it's linear

[@shiwanshu8041]

connorp3030 interesting, do you have any source on the article if you don't mind me asking

[@martinconrad9260]

Yep, it's been shown that people will more readily buy something priced at $99.99 rather than at $100.00.

[@kiranadhikari4192]

Martin Conrad of course, it is 900 dollar cheaper. ;)

[@MrSigmaSharp]

Her accent is perfect. I would love to here an audio book with her voice. Amazing video by the way as always.

[@fcturner]

You do? Even as a Brit, I find it quite posh ;)

[@brucesekulic5443]

Sybilantly distracting - is there a logarithmic scale involved in how much hissy s’s jar like scratching nails down a blackboard? Why does one person track sybilance as an annoyance while someone else doesn’t at all and describes the overall utterance as perfect?

[@Crokto]

@@fcturner really? i mean to an american its definitely on the posh end, but not *extremely* so, i wouldnt say

[@williamwoods477]

@@fcturner You are perhaps just a tad poor

[@fcturner]

@@williamwoods477 Not really, PhD just like Hannah Fry :)

[@CarlosRodriguez-dd4sb]

I'm in marketing and product development. We used an anecdote to help explain this phenomena and use as a cautionary tale. The scenario is a cost savings for a chocolate chip cookie (or biscuit for you). A cookie had around 20 chips. You do testing and find that people have a hard time perceiving the difference between 19 chips and 20 chips. So you remove some chocolate and save production costs. The next year we look to save money again. "People have a hard time distinguishing 18 chips from 19 chips in a biscuit". At this point I'd draw a plot with error bars and such. Fast forward a few years and: it's very easy for people to discern 1 vs 2 chocolate chips. Of course they would have noticed far earlier! As I mentioned, we used this as a cautionary tale to help marketers understand how changes to a product might be perceived and what might be valid and important points of reference that a consumer may use. To follow your chocolate bar example - they may not notice a 10% reduction, but they will likely notice when the bar is significantly smaller in their hand than in the past (hand is a constant). Terrific show!

[@GetMeThere1]

I think the best known example of this phenomenon is the decibel scale and hearing.

[@superliro100]

GetMeThere1 the decibel scale is logarithmic, so 1db difference should always feel the same

[@GetMeThere1]

er....I thought that was my point.

[@TOMRIDDLE2891]

i wonder this is psychological or our sensors work this way

[@kindlin]

Both, I'm sure. Look at the cochlea for the ear, it's a spiral. Spirals are inherently mathematically logarithmic objects in a continuous form.

[@metalhulk105]

Yeah in my hunt for finding a perfect equalizer setting to get more bass out of the music, I did find that simply amplifying bass frequencies didn't quite do the trick. What mattered is how much difference was there between the bass frequency and treble frequency. In a way, I was feeling more bass (there's no such thing as too much bass XD) when I lowered other frequencies than when i was simply amplifying bass frequencies.

[@MihaiNicaMath]

Really makes one appreciate Brady's expert level filming to see it done by an amateur for a few seconds. Great video :)

[@emmabee_14]

I always say how a year feels like such a long time when you're 5 years old vs. when you're 20 because when you're 5, a year is 1/5 of your life, whereas when you're 20, a year is 1/20 of your life, so it feels shorter. Didn't know there was a term for this, though- cool!

[@williamb4652]

emmabee14 Yes that is how I have always seen it

[@beeble2003]

Actually, this probably isn't the reason. Perception of the passage of time is very closely related to the formation of new memories. This is why it feels like time passes slowly when you're in danger: you're remembering a lot of what happened, so time feels slow. Conversely, as you get older, you're not forming as many new memories because you're not having as many new experiences, so time feels like it's going faster. Your brain's basically saying, "I've not formed many new memories since last year, so last year can't have been very long ago."

[@emmabee_14]

@@beeble2003 Ooh that makes a lot of sense!

[@gabrielbrunoparreira5670]

@@beeble2003 Yeah I actually read an article maybe a couple of years ago showing that the reason why the time appears to "shrink" as you get old, is because when you are younger you can actually process visual information faster and better. Thus you form more memories and consequently, as you said, times seems to go by slower. And when we get older, our ability to process visual information reduces and consequently times go by faster. Don't really quote me on that though. I am just paraphrasing what I thinks was in the article that I read a couple of years ago haha.

[@Astromath]

@@beeble2003 Now I know why the pandemic doesn't feel like it's already 1 and a half years long!

[@BigDBrian]

I think a good example of how marketing uses this is that percentage sales are used for cheap products, whereas raw numbers are used for large ones. They'll say you're saving up to $3000 dollars on a car, but you're getting 20% off your chocolate bar. That's because usually in the former case, the percentage is comparably small ;)

[@JohnnyTawq]

Hannah is available to film ceiling events

[@galibmahfuzullah6152]

if you have invited any gravity flipper I would have my next bimonthly paintball fest in the ceiling...... and Hannah can film it.

[@Piman1607]

Ceiling and vents*

[@sergejkeser7270]

FLOOR GANG!!!

[@DRTRiomais20]

Ceiling gang cringe

[@klaxoncow]

Ceiling Cat wants to know Hannah's location.

[@sebastianelytron8450]

I'm a simple man. I see Hannah Fry, I click, I like.

[@agusavior_channel]

Twinsen!

[@davidsweeney111]

Oh yes! Always got time for a bit of Fry...

[@victorkkariuki]

Sebastian Elytron team

[@cheaterman49]

Agreed :-)

[@Cory_Springer]

Yep! I get very excited when I see a new Hannah Fry video!

[@petergerdes1094]

Also regarding sentences, it's hard because of course the point of punishment is deterrence and that is plausibly also going to follow Weber's law.

[@Qba116]

This episode was really worth the weight

[@somebodysomewhere9253]

why

[@PhilNEvo]

There's always somebody somewhere who has to do it.

[@mechadrake]

ayyyyyy

[@MauroHervas]

Toma tu puto like

[@zyaicob]

+

[@ReegusReever]

The graph is so simple and beautiful. Very easy to grasp as well.

[@ryPish]

I still lose to accents and freckles.

[@guerra_dos_bichos]

creeps ps: metoo

[@throwsand]

r/creepyasterisks

[@KaliTakumi]

More Human Than Human How do you figure

[@davidsweeney111]

Oh yes! Always got time for a bit of Fry...

[@victorkkariuki]

[@pastek957]

And it correlates with a study done on tribes which showed that people without education tend to naturally place numbers logarithmically on a line (at least a good amount of them do) It's a very interesting study you should check it out

[@EchoL0C0]

Pastek It would help if I knew the name of the paper, or the names of anyone involved or really anything useful to put in a search engine lol

[@ziyad1809]

Just intuitively you'd put 1,000,000 closer to 100,000 then like, 10,000 to 1 that's not the case.

[@pindakaas42]

what you're describing would be a log scale^^

[@pastek957]

No not really, there wouldn't be any point to it if the line was already scaled, there were just the numbers 1 and 10

[@AexisRai]

I searched "uneducated tribes logarithm" and probably found your study: "Log or linear? Distinct intuitions of the number scale in Western and Amazonian indigene cultures"

[@WakarimasenKa]

I immediately starting thinking about fractional and percental differences vs absolute differences. Sure 20g is 20g. But in the first example it is 20% and in the second it is only 10%. It is a matter of tolerance.

[@farisakmal2722]

WakarimasenKa isn't that the point?

[@WakarimasenKa]

It is a different way of saying the same thing. But they didnt make that point in the video.

[@NHCH]

u r nt rigt, tyler s rigt lel

[@crimfan]

This is exactly what they're talking about, the fact that perception tends to inherently logarithmically transform quantities. Linear reasoning is very difficult except in small quantities, and requires a lot of training to do.

[@EebstertheGreat]

This applies to many things, including most of our senses, but not to everything. We don't experience differences in pressure logarithmically, for instance (that is, we could tolerate a 100 kPa atmosphere or a 90 kPa atmosphere, but we could not tolerate the winds from a 105 kPa atmosphere meeting a 100 kPa atmosphere, because a 5 kPa difference in pressure is too high). In many cases, our natural tendency to treat situations logarithmically is not rational. For example, we may spend a few extra minutes to save $3 on gas, but we will not spend a few extra hours to save $300 on a house, even though you would be getting more for your money in that case. It's absolutely something worth pointing out.

[@JAzzWoods-ik4vv]

Maybe I just got behind with the subscription feed and I missed too many videos, but I feel this is almost a second golden age of Number file. The last few videos have been just amazing! Love your channel, keep doing great stuff!

[@ALifeOfWine]

Well this confirmed many things that I'd known for years but never had a name for. Thanks!

[@TheSam1902]

Yay ! New Hannah Fry featuring videos ! Great ! Also I wanted to mention the Mel-scale which is a scale where each step in pitch is "judged" to be equivalent but when you compare it to the actual frequency scale you can see it's a logarithm.

[@stuartofblyth]

Cue discussion of the decibel.

[@duxd1452]

So many people responding that it is obvious that the difference between1 and 2 is more noticeable than 10001 and 10002 miss the point. The point was not that the former is more noticeable than the latter.. The point was that this phenomenon always follows the same basic arithmological structure that can be described mathematically. Or, in other words, this aspect of human psychology can be modeled mathematically. The notion that mathematics can be used to describe such aspects of our subjective experience of reality is far from obvious.

[@toferg.8264]

Dux D , very well said!

[@stephenbrown6069]

...and should point to the conclusion that we do indeed, live in a computer generated reality.

[@ericray687]

"You take a penny, then you take another penny... you've double your money but you still only got 2 pennies" -Ross Perot

[@enderwiggins8248]

I read a similar article about how this applies to dentistry: you can only make a certain size hole to fill in cavities, regardless of the tooth. But dentists working on larger teeth sometimes make larger holes, because of this inability to perceive absolute values instead of relative ones

[@Aaezil]

As an audio engineer this is very fascinating. You should do some videos about the maths of sound!

[@sivasreemohan2958]

Same here! I am studying sound engineering now it's making sense for me, for why do they use db instead of just linear numbers to refer spl

[@MoosesValley]

Same for kissing, My first kiss had a massive response - my knees went week, my head was spinning, etc ... but years later a kiss, while still so special and beautiful, does not quote have the same massive impact.

[@Yakhashe]

well, when i think about it, even love is logarithmic. When you first meet your lover, every date is exciting and stuff, but after a year or two such dates get "normal"...

[@RadioactiveLobster]

I wonder what the equation is for determining the ratio of comments on a Numberphile video featuring either Hannah Fry or Holly Krieger that are about the women or the math?

[@mjp152]

Can't it be both? :-D

[@gramptbeele1966]

There are so many creepy dudes in this comment section, like just let the women teach math without catcalling

[@fostercathead]

@@gramptbeele1966 What is math?

[@ThomasGiles]

Awesome! I remember watching something about how some tribes not exposed to "our" number systems count logarithmically--that they have numbers for 1, 2, 3, but then skip to 5, and then to 9 (or whatever). Which really speaks to this idea...

[@DerFliegendeMocca]

1:30 "earnest webber" :D not quite

[@agnesjeffery850]

I'm going to talk about logs with my class today in 45 minutes. I will certainly be referencing this video when I'm trying to explain it to them.

[@ddos87]

The last insight was mindblowingly profound. That should be one of our top priorities in the re-evaluation of our justice system, next to actually creating a system that rehabilitates instead of vengeance.

[@tenbeat]

This explains so much. Not even kidding. A lot of these videos are just fun, like, "oh how would you evenly divide a ham sandwich" or "in an infinite vineyard of evenly spaced trees how many trees could you see" which is great and interesting, but this one actually fills in holes in the logic I had built in my mind over the years I've lived. Thank you Hannah.

[@twentytwo_22]

really great episode! I always struggled to explain my friends the perception of aging, but now i can show them this video :)

[@DennisGr]

proud moment, i came up with the "years" theory when i was about 25 when i asked myself why it seemed to speed up so much and concluded it could only be a classic case of "absolute vs relative" values.

[@missionpupa]

There is also an alternative explanation to this, that there are less novel experiences when we get older, so Time actually slows down because there is more neural activity. if time is only as long as we perceive it is, then it ultimately boils down to neural activity. That is why when you drive to a certain location, travel time always seems faster when you return, simply because your brain is processing less information from the trip because it already knows what its seeing.

[@MathManMcGreal]

Oh hey I just taught logs. I gave examples using the old Richter scale, astronomy, and noise levels to still get the inevitable "when will I ever need this?" question. This... might be a better way for students to connect to the log.

[@gigglysamentz2021]

This was amaaaazing ! So much cool stuff packed in there :'D Hannah is great at explaining these things and making them sound relevant,

[@Drachenbauer]

I also noticed, in RPG-games where players level up their character or creature-team to become stronger in fight, the status walues often grow by bigger and bigger amounts each levelup, the higher the level already is. It prevents from feeling, that level-ups are worthless at wery high levels.

[@Geekeric]

This is the most interesting thing I have heard all week; well done!

[@brandoncalvert8379]

Absolutely fascinating. I feel like I understood this intuitively before, but I love putting names and numbers to things

[@CinnamonSandman]

Always upvote Hannah Fry

[@colunizator]

In order to feel that you live a longer life you have to have more memories, in other words, learn new things, travel, try something new. Ordinary day to day life gets bored and because you have few things to remember, time feels to pass very fast.

[@heyandy889]

Even if Weber's relationship seems obvious to you, it is still critically important because it implies that most people are making suboptimal decisions most of the time. Weber's relationship implies that a person perceives a price doubling for eggs as the same as a price doubling for their rent. This is clearly irrational. We need to study and understand these failures of reasoning in order to make better decisions at personal, professional, and policy levels.

[@MrDannyDetail]

Surely the law actually implies that they would more negatively perceive a doubling of the price of eggs than a doubling of their rent? Or perhaps we should swap out rent for, say, a telly or something (because rent already has extra negative perception around it than eggs before any numbers get changed). If they perceived them as the same the perception would be linear rather than logarythmic.

[@heyandy889]

Eggs: $1 TV: $1000 Now imagine an increase in price. Eggs: $2 TV: $1001 If our perception of cost were linear, then we would be equally unhappy with both price increases. After all, the extra dollar does not know whether it is being saved on eggs or on the TV: a dollar is a dollar. But that is not the case. We see the eggs doubling in price, while it "feels like" the price of the TV barely creeps up. Under the logarithmic relationship of perception, in order to feel an equivalent sadness, the price of the TV would need to increase to $2000. We do not perceive the change's magnitude, but rather the change's scale. This failure in rational decision making is captured by Weber's relationship.

[@hans-joachimbierwirth4727]

Except it isn't a failure. You aren't rational. Literally!

[@hans-joachimbierwirth4727]

1000 eggs: 1 TV 1 TV: 1000 eggs. That's how money works. BTW average lifespan of a TV is six years and average consumation of eggs over six years isn't far away from a TV's price which is a nice coincidence and by the same time destroying irrational ideas regarding prices and rationality.

[@angelmendez-rivera351]

heyandy x It would be terrible decision making to use linearity, much in the same way that it is terrible economist analysis to determine income rates by means and not by medians. Also, no, according to Weber’s law, the perception in difference between the doubling in rent is definitely not the same as the doubling in egg prices. dP/P = k dT, and if the boundaries of integration are T = T1 and T = 2T1, then ln P(2T1)/P(T1) = k(T1)

[@EchosTackyTiki]

Makes perfect sense, really. If you offer me $5 off my $10 shirt, I'm gonna take it. That's 50% off. If you offer me $5 of my $100 jacket, well.... well I'm still gonna take it, but it's not gonna feel like I'm saving as much. That's only 5% off. We definitely do perceive things logarithmically.

[@Fux704]

Hannah Fry ASMR

[@agentcmac]

Yes please. HB pencil on a 30 lb paper, and all the formulas :)

[@mysticalpie4695]

Educational asmr

[@KhalilEstell]

Wow, I've heard of this concept before but never knew there was a mathematical law for it. Im going to start thinking about ways to apply this in other areas of life. Also, I absolutely love Dr. Fry! Her topics are always so fun and she is so charasmatic. Can't wait for more videos with her in it.

[@davidstretch5614]

You should look up psychophysics - an area of psychology that looks at these sorts of issues in depth

[@tomstech4390]

This explains the myth of shaved beards growing faster. It's effective just saying we can perceive difference as a percentage much better than absolutes (in this instance 20%). I'M GUESSING you can tell a 10% difference like 100g vs 110g about the same as 1kg vs 1.1kg. But 1kg vs 1.01kg.....well that's only 1%. That's why when I look at difference I always do it as a percentage first and consider

[@SarahMcClutchy]

I wish this was how LOG was explained to me in high school. I never got it, but the way you break it down here makes total sense and is easy for teenagers to understand.

[@TreuloseTomate]

Thank you for the existential crisis.

[@jamez6398]

"Hannah is available for filming weddings and corporate events." Excellent! I've always wanted my wedding video to be out of focus and poorly framed. This is what I've always wanted in my life... 😎

[@xCr00k3Dx]

Yay! More Hannah Fry! :D

[@flamencoprof]

This, as mentioned, is defininately relevant to sound perception. The variable resistors (pots) used to control volume (or whatever other touch app nowadays) usually have a logarithmic amount of volume change for a given rotation or swipe of the control. Each click or dial setting or whatever may represent a 10x increase in actual sound output. It is well known that "11" is much louder than "10"! :-)

[@p-raven]

Is this not just a percent change (100-120 is 20% and 200-220 is 10%)

[@jacobshirley3457]

It probably is.

[@angelmendez-rivera351]

It is more complicated than this. How so? Because the percent error between 10 and 9 is 10%, but the percent error between 10^10 and 10^9 is 90%; however, the absolute difference in the latter case is MUCH larger and the ratio between the two numbers is the same in the second case as in the first, which underlined the fact that the perception of differences is not a rational function, but an actual logarithm.

[@Funnybone_FB]

Yes, I believe the log is describing the rate at which a constant change on any given value would yield smaller ratios as the initial value increases.

[@Mihau_desu]

@@angelmendez-rivera351 How ratio between 9 and 10 is the same as between 10^9 and 10^10 ? According to my mental mathematical calculations: 9 divided by 10 is simply 9/10 or 0.9. When 10^9 / 10^10 = 1/10 or 0.1. Can you explain what do you mean by saying 'ratio', because I struggle to find any other meaning of this word than what I have just did.

[@angelmendez-rivera351]

Sigma 1 I admit I made mistake. I definitely meant to use a different word other than "ratio" in that particular sentence, but as this was 4 months ago, I have no clue what is it that I truly meant to say. I have to rethink it.

[@AlyoshaK]

When I have to explain this to Raman spectroscopy users I use the "Captain in the Rowboat" analogy : it is much easier to get the captain's weight by weighing the rowboat with and without the captain and then subtracting than weighing the ocean liner with and without the captain. (In Raman spectroscopy we have to reduce background signal as much as possible because the Raman scattering signal is so small.)

[@alexandermiller4438]

I'm sure someone has mentioned it in the comments already, but in case someone hasn't: there is a behavioral economics model called Hyperbolic Discounting that is precisely Weber's Law applied to how people's preferences adapt with respect to time. This law shows up EVERYWHERE!!!

[@glenm99]

Trivia: Ernst Weber's brother Wilhelm is the namesake of the SI unit for magnetic flux.

[@Onetwoone1]

So to slow time down you need to have new experiences everyday

[@metalhulk105]

or have an amnesia :D

[@HenriFaust]

But novelty is stimulating so the time will seem to pass more quickly... unless those new things happen to be either unpleasant or horrifying.

[@scienceandmusicmix]

This also made me think of Beer's Law and how we use absorbance as the log of transmittance, it shows up in physical properties as well

[@hitchikerspie]

Yay more Hannah!

[@coopaloopmex]

I heard this before but from the opposite direction. That as we grow we are taught to un-learn to think logarithmicallly. Squirrels or dogs or what-have-you cannot notice the difference between 10 and 12 nuts or dog-bones or anyting. Show them a pile of 10 and 12 of either and they pick either pile at 50/50 chance. But show them piles of 2 and 4, and they always pick 4. But that before humans are taught to count 1,2,3,4,5,6,7... even babies see the logarithmic pattern and inherently notice it. But once we are taught 6,7,8,9,10,11,12... we "Think" we can notice (read:count) these differences by 2 more milkbones, or dollars, or what-have-you, but Hannah shows us that when we cannot actually count them, in fact, we cannot.

[@Laurabeck329]

That took dark turn at the end.

[@BitwiseMobile]

It's makes intuitive sense and after reading The Physics of Mind you can get a better understanding of how the ion channels which govern the perception in our brains behave. We only have three forms of perception (despite the long standing notion of 5 senses). Those are tactile (or vibration), light, and chemical. Touch and hearing are both vibration based. Vision is light based, and finally smell/taste are chemical based. The response of these ion channels is also non-linear and logarithmic in nature. Since the underlying "electronics" of our bodies responds at logarithmic rates it's completely intuitive to expect that we would perceive things in a similar matter. It's why volume knobs are usually logarithmic - that number 10 is actually 10 times higher than number 9. Our ion channels are not the only thing in nature which follows a logarithmic cadence either. Nature abounds with examples of Euler's number.

[@OlbaidFractalium]

Oh, I see. So We need the courage when we start a new thing.

[@RenX3133]

Exactly, because the slope of the curve is very steep in the beginning. That's why we tend to stay on the same path and reject change, because the slope gets more and more flat the further you go that path, so it takes less effort to move forward even more.

[@sirdgar]

wery well pointed out...

the same with relationships...

[@MotorGoblin]

Not even sure if we need courage. After the steep beginning, it evens out a lot. We just need the courage to start a new... oh I see it now (sorry I'm drunk).

[@lordbuddybear]

Oooh...

[@JefiKnight]

When it comes to how fast we perceive time as we get older, I am so glad it gets faster logorithmically and not exponentially.

[@SamuelNiemirycz]

Hi guys is it possible to get a name of this paper about judges and sentencing?

[@chillsahoy2640]

Our currency is logarithmic: 'parts' of a one (1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p or in USD the cents, nickels and dimes), then £1, £2, £5, £10, £20...£50. The value of each item approximately doubles each time. To a small KZbin channel, being featured on some blog and getting an extra 1000 views and 50 subscribers can be an enormous boost but by the time you are the size of, say, Numberphile, that same boost becomes less significant even though it represents the same time investment and commitment from people. I think CGP Grey even mentioned once that the value of each individual piece of feedback goes down as more and more people give feedback. Our brains certainly seem to naturally analyze situations using a logarithmic scale, where we value the proportional relation between values more than the net difference.

[@LivKASS]

So is that why I can always tell if someone shorted me on an eighth just by holding it?🤣

[@batuhankavlak]

Marketers are really doing it. It is a well-known practice in Fast-Moving-Consumer-Products. One cannot find an item that is stabilized even for a year. Constantly marketers change their size according to the price and competitors. Usually, it is 2g for chocolate bars.

[@twilightknight123]

At the end, Hannah seems to imply that giving jail sentences logarithmically is a bad thing because "3 months is 3 months". But the point of jail isn't to quarantine individuals for a certain amount of time, but rather to reform them, correct? So if a 20 year term and a 20 year and 3 month term both FEEL like the same amount of time, then aren't they essentially the same punishment? Maybe prison terms make you feel time differently than you normal do?

[@angelmendez-rivera351]

Ryan Wilson Your last sentence nails it, but also, you did miss an important point: a lot of people in the West (well, mostly just the U.S.A, but the U.S.A comprises a very significant percentage of what is called “the West”) do think of prison as quarantining process, and they do not agree with using the system as a reform.

[@johnlcallaway]

Interesting video, I wondered about time perception as I get older and thought it was related to the number of years that had passed, but didn't know there was some research that showed it. When my wife and I went back to our hometown after being away for 30 years, we both felt the town was much smaller. But then I suggested that when we were young, we walked or rode our bike's everywhere, we didn't have cars until just before we left town. Our perception of 'distance' was really a perception of 'time'. (Although our parents drove us around, I guess we didn't pay as much attention to the time/distance as when we were doing it ourselves.) After watching this video, I wonder that since we now regularly drive for many miles (our hometown was only about 5 miles across) on a regular basis, be it commuting or vacationing, a few miles traveled really doesn't seem like much anymore. I've also taken car trips of thousands of miles at least 12 times as an adult. I would like to suggest that life doesn't follow an algorithm .. algorithms define characteristics of things around us :-)

[@Onetwoone1]

What happens when someone is on a deserted island and time seems to be slower.

[@Deadlines-X]

thats called boredom

[@jaredcarter1165]

titaniumonkey it might seem slower at first with comparatively few things to do but then over time it also might seem to go faster because of the monotony and increasing number of repetitions of whatever there is to do.

[@Niki1A_]

Actually that might also be due to Weber's Law because a day seems much longer compared to the time you are on that deserted island, than compared to the time you have been living a normal live. So a day seems to be longer on the deserted island. Of course there are other psychological effects with time perception as well.

[@davidsweeney111]

No stress, no hassles, no other people, life is great!

... or when you're doing something exciting and time just flies by.

[@prismaticmarcus]

i'm thinking back to march 2020 and it didn't feel then like 2020 would ever end, let alone 2021. now, in retrospect, it feels like it flew past. YMMV.

[@AbramSF]

iPhone torch is my new word of the week. Edit: I wonder if you could do this with calories? What would the scale be? How many calories could you cut in a day without your body noticing and feeling hungry?

[@KuraIthys]

That's pretty tricky to measure. Calorie information on most foods is an estimate only. And I've heard any given thing you eat that lists them can have variances exceeding 20% based on unpredictable factors such as variation in ingredients and how any given batch was prepared. Actually pretty important to know when you think about it. Because if you're actively trying to count calories and intended to drop from say 3500 to 3000 calories... Well, 20% of 3000 is +-600 So in any event you'd need more reliable calorie measurements to meaningfully test this, I suspect.

[@figa5567]

Well not really. You just need a suficiently large sample size. Those calorie measurements are based on the average of the test batch and for most products, those batches are large enough to be representative. Even if for a specific product they are not, you have 2 things in your advantage: first, you eat a large variety of products. So even if the information on one of them is wrong by 30%, it doesn't really affect your daily intake, because it's just 1 product. Second, you can always compare the calories from one product to the other. Like take noodles for example. You know how many calories they have, even if one product claims a value that is somewhat different from the other products, it's still in that ballpark range. They're noodles after all. So you just need to make sure the average calorie intake goes from 3500 to 3000. Yeah in the short term you might get "unlucky" but it'll even out at some point.

[@RenCarl1sle]

In the short term, hunger is more of a learned response a lot of the time. This is why if you say fast for a day, you will most likely feel hungry at the times you would usually eat.

[@nickjohnson8495]

This law applies to conscious minds. “Your body” is subconscious and “you” are conscious. Numbers do not mean anything to your body and your body does not perceive differences between anything. The difference between 1 and 2 calories is the same as the difference between 999 and 1000. Just my own thoughts

[@figa5567]

Well this just got really deep really quickly.

[@jakolu]

The fact that people consider differences in quantities relative to their magnitude is pretty intuitive. The notion that the ratio (threshold to notice the change) is constant is more interesting, although that's probably an approximation in most cases (e.g. sensitivity of differences in weight, e.g. at the extremes light objects' weight won't be perceived at all and heavy objects might be imperceptibly heavy).

[@josipcuric8767]

I'm a simple man; I see Hannah, I click. I see Hannah holding the camera, I go away.

[@saxd0ct0r]

I have seen this exact pattern with traditional metronome markings. Usually beginning at 36, they increment by 2 until you reach 60, then by 3 until 72, and by 4 until 120, at which point the increments go by 6, and then 8. There are always 16 steps between any given tempo and double that tempo.

[@OlafDoschke]

Which means you should have your midlife crisis at about the age of 8, because 2*ln(8)=ln(8^2)=ln(64)

[@NoNameAtAll2]

Olaf Doschke Except that people "feel" that their "opportunity time" begins in ~14-15 ln(30)+(ln(30)-ln(15))=ln(60)

[@SKO_PL]

Assuming you start your life at the age of 1...

[@OlafDoschke]

That's the weakness of that approach. Let's do it for days, then it's about sqrt(70*365.25) = ca. 160 days, even earlier.

[@st3435]

Or to me, why people later in life can't deal well with big changes - why old dogs can't learn new tricks, why people die of broken hearts after years living together. The change in intensity is a huge leap that they hadn't been accustomed to since their youth.

[@mobob7989]

Well it isn’t an exact ln curve it is adjusted

[@TheYoyozo]

This has become my favorite channel on YT!

[@billrussell3955]

This was an outstanding clip thanks! This helps me with spin and dimensionality in classical and quantum physics. And Hannah is very easy on the eyes!

[@benmjt]

Christ

[@davecroden9793]

I love Hannah’s voice.

[@jason-ge5nr]

finally hannah fry!

[@krakenmetzger]

Interesting! I derived this when I was bored in 9th grade chemistry class. It's always fun to learn you deduced an equation that has a name. Makes me feel slightly less hopeless about my mathematical ability!

[@atyj1]

This is ever so mildly depressing

[@altrag]

Why? Its just a fact of life. Honestly it wouldn't really be much different if physics and biology happened to work on a geometric scale, as long as all aspects of reality were equivalently shifted. Basically it just means instead of drawing 1,2,3,4,... on your Y axis when you graph something, you draw 1,10,100,1000,...

[@chillsahoy2640]

It's quite depressing when this is the only problem in your life. To make it seem less depressing, you should surround yourself with more negative things so that this fact becomes proportionally less significant. :) But really, it's just the way brains work. You've been using Weber's Law all your life without ever noticing, the only difference is that now you know a little bit more about yourself and the way you perceive the world.

[@a.r.4822]

Welcome to life

[@titleloanman]

Coincidentally, the curve that describes how many Hannah Fry videos we need is a straight line to infinity at the “more” value.

[@RichardDominguezTheMagicIsReal]

Hanna is beautiful

[@carlosc.1568]

Very Aristocratic

[@bloodspilla55]

Richard Dominguez open bob

[@briantw]

Thanks for the astute and irrelevant observation.

[@RichardDominguezTheMagicIsReal]

Brian Tristam Williams my pleasure as it has more relevance than the one you just made

[@kefsound]

stop it

[@CraigBass1988]

All makes sense, especially with how time “feels” quicker as you get older. When you’re 5 years old and it feels like it’s been ages between christmases, that’s because it’s been 1/5th of your life. The older you get, the smaller fraction a year of your life becomes.

[@skeletonrowdie1768]

1:55 now this 'lead' to an equation. Lol, talking about weights it's quite ironic.

[@markwhittam8744]

A Hannah Fry video on the day she appears on Twitter in Monaco for the GP! Excited? Jealous? Too many emotions!

[@SchutzmarkeGMBH]

If you sentence someone to 2 years and 3 days of jail, boy is he gonna have ants in his bottom during those last three days

[@somebodysomewhere9253]

Yeah but for the whole 2 years and 3 days there would be something else in their bottom

[@altrag]

Yeah but if you sentence them to 2 years, he's going to have the same amount of ants as soon as he hits day 727..

[@christopherellis2663]

And that could be the least of his worries

[@Blox117]

but how many days are in 2 years??

[@Jesse-op2wd]

you brits are a weird bunch ya?

[@DavePawson]

Clear as ever Hannah. It's the enthusiasm that comes over.! Tks

[@jesusthroughmary]

Redheads don't go gray, they fade away to white.

[@christopherellis2663]

jesusthroughmary Lol, yes.

[@Triumvirate888]

As a side note, on a logarithmic scale, human beings are exactly in the middle between the size of atoms, and the size of galaxies. Which might explain why we perceive things in this fashion, because we are perfectly positioned to view the smallest things and the biggest things in exactly that manner.

[@JimGriffOne]

People get closer in age the older they get. This is probably why age gap doesn't matter nearly as much the older you get. Examples (with 10 year age gap): A 20-year-old is 100% older than a 10-year-old. Give +50 years to each and now the 70-year-old is only 16.7% older than the 60-year-old. Extended really far, a 1010-year-old is only 1.01% older than a 1000-year-old.

[@sirelkir]

I still remember giving my age in whole years and quarters when I was around 7.

[@chillsahoy2640]

This may also be why people are more likely to use fractions of a year when referring to how long they've been in a company but they never do that with age. "I'm 42 and a half years old" versus "I've been working for this company for the last 4 and a half years." That half year difference could be significant in the beginning but eventually it's just too small to matter in the grand scheme of how long you've been alive for.

[@drbrodo5122]

When Hannah took the camera, the difference of video quality was definitely bigger than my sensibility range.

[@yasirazhari3794]

from this you can figure out that if we assume the average human life to be about 80 years, by the time you're around 17 you've experienced half of your life.

[@iainburgess8577]

Also applies to age vs impatience & boredom. I didn't realise there was a law for it, but I've been thinking about this in behavioral contexts.