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rhollerith_dot_com comments on Checking for the Programming Gear - Less Wrong
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My experience with my friends without the gear suggests that an pretty good test on adults for the programming gear is to see if they have retained certain kinds of knowledge of arithmetic that schools everywhere try to teach young children.
E.g. ask multiple-choice questions like, "Express .2 as a fraction," and, "Express 1/4 as a decimal," listing 1/2 as one of the choices for the first question.
Another decent one, I am guessing is, "Which is a better deal for someone that knows they are probably going to keep taking Zowie pills for a long time: a bottle of 60 Zowie pills for $45 or a bottle of 100 pills for $80?" E.g., a simple alegbra word problem of a kind with which most people with economic concerns would regularly keep in practice just by being a consumer.
Note: this is me reply to myself (which I concede is a little lame and maybe I shouldn't've.)
I forgot my favorite question of this type, which, BTW, a couple of doctors I consulted did not seem to be able to answer: how many micrograms in .05 milligrams?
In other words, my hypothesis is that the way to identify the "programming gear" is to test knowledge of some really simple "formal system" such as arithmetic or metric-system prefixes that one would expect adults with a practical command of the simple formal system to be well-rehearsed in.
Note that the second one is answered not by computing the prices per pill, but by noticing that buying in bulk is nearly always cheaper (and possibly that it has to be so if manufacturers are trying to make a profit).
Actually, its is not uncommon in the U.S. for the big retail chains like Whole Foods to violate this expectation that larger quantities are nearly always cheaper per unit.
Why do they do that? Because it is a way to distinguish between buyers who are willing to do the calculation and those who are not. Well, to be more precise, it is a way to get a higher price from those unwilling to do the math while at the same time retaining the custom of those who are willing. Practices of this kind are known by economists and marketing professionals as "segmenting the market", retail discount coupons' being an older and more often cited example.
Is Whole Foods exempt from listing unit price?
I doubt it.
There is a supermarket a couple of 100 yards from here, so I went over there, where I learned the following.
Sale items are exempt from the requirement to display the unit price.
The unit price on one brand of chickpeas was expressed as dollars per ounce. Next to it was another brand of chickpeas whose unit price was expressed in dollars per can.
Hope that helps.
That rule gives a wrong answer here.