[travel] Intuitive yardsticks

[mattbell]

Speaking of math and money, a lot of people seem to have a poor intuitive sense for numbers. Given I've had to switch currencies every few days (I'm up to 17 currencies), it's been interesting to watch how I assimilate new units of measure. I have to use each currency unit of measure at least a dozen times every day, so I get a lot of practice. At first, I usually find some quick conversion trick that turns it into dollars. Most of the time it's simple (eg divide by 10, divide by 3 etc) but with more complicated ones I can usually turn it into two easy steps. For example, in Lithuania, I had to divide by 2.5 to get dollars, but it was much easier to divide by 10 and then quadruple it. After a couple of days in each country, I notice that I don't need to translate anymore except for unusual items. What seems to be happening is that my mind starts putting reference values in place (eg in Prague a nice meal usually costs 150-200, a good museum should be 100, beer should be 20 etc). It's not a declarative memory in that I usually experience this knowledge when I'm looking at a price and get an intuitive sense for how cheap or expensive it is.

The same has happened with Celsius. I now know 0 is freezing. 10 is a very chilly day, 20 is pleasantly cool, 30 is quite warm, and 40 was me baking in the Sahara. I now tie the Celsius number directly to a sense of how much clothing I should put on. This actually took a month to develop since I only would have to think about a temperature once every few days. So at least for me, it seems that it takes about 20-30 mental conversions to build up an intuitive sense for a new measurement of a familiar quantty.

Anyway, back to other people. While some people seem reasonably talented, I've noticed that others employ various strategies to avoid having to do any math in their heads. For example, they will get what they determine to be, say $200 from an ATM or exchange, and then just buy things they want, watching to see how quickly their $200 disappears. Others keep asking local merchants if they can pay in dollars or euros. One woman I met simply bought a package tour so she could just pay once for everything and wouldn't have to figure anything out.

It's unclear how useful this particular skill is, long term. People can simply use calculators on their phones to translate a value on an unfamiliar scale to a familiar scale. (though you'll look quite uncool in a bar if you're punching numbers in to find out what all the drinks cost).* Other skills are like this too -- once everyone has GPS and Google Maps in their pocket, having a good sense of direction is a lot less important. However, I think there's still a lot of value in having a good intuitive ability to manipulate numbers in general. The art of taking an unfamiliar set of numbers and knowing what to do with them to make sense of them is something you can't let a calculator handle for you.

*While you can to some degree outsource your math and navigation tasks to a bit of technology, you can't do the same with your social skills or your ability to write witty emails.

Comments

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

When I was traveling in South America this past winter, I made a habit of getting a simple equation for each place and sticking to it.

The math really isn't that hard though! It's pretty much simple multiplication or division, right?

In Argentina, "Take the cost in pesos and divide by three. That's about how many dollars."
In Chile, "Take the cost in thousands of pesos and double it. That's about how many dollars."
In the Falklands "Take the cost in Falklands pounds and double it. That's a little more than how many dollars."

I'd evaluate from there. I seemed to get much better deals when paying local currency than dollars. (In the Falkands, the pubs were charging about double for dollars compared to Falklands pounds.)

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Oh right, the Brits still control the Falklands. What was that like? I'm imagining a bunch of hardcore British colonist types.

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

The Falklands folks were all super charming. Tiny island, aggressively British and quaint. About 1500 people, plenty of tourism, lovely quaint suburban houses, lots of penguins, rusty derelicts in the bay, lots of memory of the war still, significant military presence, lots of sheep and wool crafts, pubs and pastie houses. No crime to speak of except pub brawls. Gorgeous vistas. Everyone's very friendly. Kinda touristy, but mostly very small-town and charming and... well, quaint.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I got really screwed up in Canada when gas was not only in Canadian dollars (~90c/$1 at the time) but ALSO in liters! I was all "holy crap gas is cheap! ..oh wait". I'm sure I would have figured it out if I had been there more than 3 days... and if I had actually been the one driving.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

speaking of getting an intuitive sense for units of measure, have you seen this?

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Ouch. That was very effective.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Because I spent the fall of 2000 in Budapest, and apart from that haven't lived anywhere that temperatures get close to freezing in over 10 years, I find that I'm better with cold temperatures in Centigrade than in Fahrenheit, but better with warm ones in F than C (the start of last summer in Australia didn't quite help me enough with that).