Comment by osigurdson

10 hours ago

They keep saying that. I'd say it is more like human brains that don't remember high school math have trouble with it.

Reasoning is a strong statement here. But it is fair to say that it usually is not intuitive to us.

An example is if I gave you a huge sheet of thin paper (huge so that folding isn’t an issue) - how many times could you fold it in half until you couldn’t physically do it anymore? Could you do at least 10? Try this with random people and you’d be surprised how many say they could do 10 easily.

Or the chess board question. Works to rather get the financial equivalent of starting with a penny and then doubling it for every square on the board or a million dollars for each square? Again, if you ask people to pick one without giving them the time to work it out they will usually pick the million dollar per square.

  • But you're not reasoning yourself here. In face you're literally parroting what an LLM would do in this situation: you already know the answer so you think your comprehension of this is better than that if others, when in fact it's just simple pattern matching. It's not a measure of intelligence, it's a measure of memory.

If something at rest is accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, how long in seconds will it take to reach 10% of c? Answer to the nearest order of magnitude - will it take approximately 1000, 10k, 100k, 1000k seconds?

I’m sure you know this is an exponential growth question but have no intuition of the answer.