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SilasBarta comments on Less Wrong Polls in Comments - Less Wrong
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The results so far (only showing answers with > 1 responder):
To regenerate this, run
grep -v "#" poll.csv | awk -F , '{ print $3 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr.I'm not surprised by the number of votes for 2^31-1. It was the first number to pop into my head when I saw the poll.
According to my I Ching calculator, beyond 4 is a suffusion of yellow.
This appears not to be a valid response. Curious.
The largest number is about 45,000,000,000, although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers. (45,000,000,001?)
Set theorists sometimes remark that there are only very few natural numbers. I think this can be made more quantitative: Based on observations of their blackboard drawings and accompanying explanations, my current best estimate is that there are about five to ten. However, so far, my confidence in this estimate is only moderate; I still think the number could ultimately turn out to be as high as twenty.
....
I was hoping the mode would be 2147483647 (my answer) to at least provide some humor, but 0 has it beat handily.
According to the poll, my understanding of what qualifies as an integer is very, very wrong. 1e+19=the universal integer limit. NO EXCEPTIONS!
I'll just leave Mr. Show's "highest number" sketch here.
It does not seem to accept 'inf' or 'infinite'.
Which is too bad, as all incorrect options should have the same rights (for moral reasons).
NaN
Doesn't accept "⌊∞⌋".
As well it shouldn't?
Well, use of those would make the mean meaningless.
It wouldn't be a problem if the polls had upper and lower bounds, because then you could exclude them (but you could also make the upper bound infinite if you wanted to). I don't think there's a need for them, though.
You don't need to use infinities to make the mean meaningless: giving answers such as 1e100 will suffice. On the other hand, NANs are traditionally just disregarded when computing means (i.e., the mean of 1, 2, 3 and NAN is taken to be 2) -- essentially they would amount to a blank vote.
MP did not want it to accept either of those things; the notation used suggests "the largest integer less than or equal to infinity", which doesn't exist.