
How Old Is The Shepherd? (2013) - autokill
http://robertkaplinsky.com/how-old-is-the-shepherd/
======
svat
Timothy Gowers had a similar point at
[https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot](https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0/posts/4bkfusUoXot)
(dead link now):

> if one asks children a question such as the following: a number 35 bus pulls
> up at a bus stop and 8 passengers get on; what is the age of the bus driver?
> A large percentage of children, their minds numbed by years of symbol
> manipulation, will give the answer 43. This is a tragedy: rather than being
> trained to think, these children have been trained to do the opposite.

Also here:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/maths-...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/11/maths-
isnt-problem-curriculum-lacking-imagination)

This is basic stimulus-response behaviour: school education is effectively a
game that the children are playing to win points, and within that environment
“thinking” is wasteful and disincentivized.

(See also: Lockhart's Lament
[https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....](https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf),
the heart-breaking _How Children Fail_ by John Holt, etc.)

Gowers also had a couple of posts on a very different way of teaching
mathematics:

[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-
mathemati...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/how-should-mathematics-
be-taught-to-non-mathematicians/)

[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-
gr...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/a-trip-to-watford-grammar-
school-for-boys/)

~~~
dredmorbius
NB: Searching by numeric G+ UUID sometimes works, though in this case, the
Wayback Machine seems not to have captured the URL:

[https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://plus.google.com/103703080789076472131/posts/4bkfusUoXot/)

There's a mapping of a few notable G+ usernames here, including Dr. Gowers:

[https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Name...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2B_Notable_Names_Database)

We tried. Sorry.

~~~
svat
Thanks for your efforts! Actually, despite ArchiveTeam's statement of having
captured 98.6% of public profiles, I wasn't able to find a single post (let
alone a complete list of posts) of a single person I cared about on the
Wayback Machine as a result of the last-minute scraping (there were a few that
had been crawled earlier): neither any of my friends, nor people like Timothy
Gowers, Terence Tao, John Baez, Linus Torvalds, etc. I just assumed it had
somehow not been uploaded to the Wayback Machine yet, but if it's gone... oh
well. Such is life. Thanks again anyway!

~~~
dredmorbius
It's possible some content hasn't yet been ingested, though I'd thought it
would be there by now. Just checked Archiveteam's pages, no clear info there.

------
GlenTheMachine
I work for a government agency. You’d be surprised how often we play very
complex versions of this game.

Or maybe you wouldn’t. In any case, in my experience, about once a week.
Essentially, your sponsors lets you know they want an answer to an
unanswerable question (“how can we best weaponize salmon?”). Then we play
“guess the answer the sponsor wants”.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> (“how can we best weaponize salmon?”)

Is the intended target a population of bears? In that case, I have a cunning
plan...

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6848166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6848166)

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720571)

------
tempguy9999
I had to look up what eight grade age was. It's apparently 13-14. FYI.

Kids brains are not developed well at that age, plus being given endless
questions at school _to which there are answers_ will accustom them to
assuming an answer exists. Standing up to authority is something they aren't
taught to do, in fact the opposite. I can understand what's going on. At that
age I'd say what I think (and sometimes get into trouble for it) but most
wouldn't - and as adults I still find a lot of people won't, which is beyond
saddening.

Can anyone recall the study where _adults_ were asked to estimate something
(IIRC whether one line was shorter or longer than another) and when actors
were there to give the wrong answer, some people were pressured into agreeing
with something that was obviously wrong.

The question may also be thought of as a trick, per the old riddle: "A man
stepped out of his tent with his rifle and walked 1 mile south, 1 mile east
and 1 Mile north. Then he shot a bear in front of his tent. What color was the
bear?".

Some of this problem lies with us adults I guess.

------
joe_the_user
How would you answer this question if you got it during a job interview?
Oddly, it seems a bit like the infamous "spit ball an answer to how many
dentists there are in Cleveland" type questions Google was famous (or
infamous) for. The number of sheep might be a clue to age if shepherds
accumulate sheep in a lifetime (naturally, no reason to think they do, sadly).

There's a lot of authority issues involved. Do you admit to an authority that
you don't know how to solve X? Do you challenge an authority that they don't
know either? Do you doubly challenge that authority by alleging they gave you
a bullshit question for kicks?

And after authorities throw such a question at students, they're happy to draw
conclusions about what feeble solution efforts the student made?

And this is after students have been inured to treating math as a bondage and
discipline exercise in following instructions, after math has been drained of
any large meaning.

The people did this experiment should be whipped with a wet noodle.

~~~
throwaway-d81
The people who did this experiment highlighted a very important problem.

Furthermore they provided a ridiculously easy test that gives tangible
results.

The question now is, how do we cut this number from 75% to essentially zero.

------
alkonaut
The “maths” section of the Swedish SAT actually _only_ deals with exactly this
type of question (or at least it did last time I took it).

You get one question “how old is the shepherd” and then two pieces of
information A: there are 125 sheep B: there are 5 dogs.

The alternatives for answering the question is whether it can be answered
using A alone, B alone, requires both A and B, can be solved with either A or
B, or can’t be solved at all.

This is a failure if 13-14 year olds are so used to being given questions that
can be answered, that they are uncomfortable telling an authority that “it’s
not possible to answer this”. It’s probably universal and I’m sure the same
result could be found in Sweden despite our SAT’s (done later) have a whole
section on finding nonsense.

------
duxup
It isn't much different in the working world. Answers are expected regardless
of how impossible they may be and frankly most management do not take a non
answer well.

------
Jupe
[https://fredlybrand.com/2014/05/03/seven-red-lines-aka-
the-e...](https://fredlybrand.com/2014/05/03/seven-red-lines-aka-the-expert-
the-transcript/) ?

------
nkurz
I wonder how much correlation there is between answers to this question in 8th
grade and "life success". We can define life success in many ways, including
lifetime income, number of offspring, and overall happiness.

My guess would be that the young pedants who refuse to answer the question,
saying "not enough information", do worse on average for each of these metrics
than their more compliant but completely wrong peers.

(I would have been one of the young pedants)

------
karel1980
Can we give points to the one who answered 42?

------
erikpukinskis
I glean from this that the correct answer is 125 / 5 = 25 years old. 16 out of
32 kids can’t be wrong.

------
kiba
I missed the opportunity to answer this question, especially when I gathered
the cues at the bottom of the post to recognize what the question was trying
to do.

It's like watching a video about asking people where the matters in a tree
comes from. You now know the answer instead of being made to think it out.

------
WalterBright
The correct answer is:

    
    
       5 < age < 100

~~~
galfarragem
Safer answer:

    
    
        3 < age < 125

------
crag
There is no answer. That's not the point. They want to know your response
anyway. Will you be funny, loud, blunt - whatever you do, answer.

