A couple of years ago my workplace was running one of those guess-the-number-of-jellybeans-in-the-jar competitions. I don't even like jellybeans all that much, but nonetheless, I held aloft my nonmagic calculator and said "by the power of Galton!" Taking the mean of all the previous guesses, I put that down as my answer. I was out by one bean, and won the jar. I don't think my colleagues have ever been so interested in statistics as they were that afternoon, and I doubt they ever will be again.
I'm going to admit something a bit silly and embarrassing now: that made me feel like a wizard. Not because of the scope of what I'd done, since it was an utterly trivial piece of arithmetic, but because of the reaction it got. I had drawn on arcane lore unknown to my colleagues, and used it to exercise power over the world.
Personally, I think something like solid state semiconductor technology is about as impressive a real-world miracle as one could ever want by way of demonstrating the whole Science Works/Rationality Is Systematised Winning/Maths Has Manifold Real-World Applications thing, but for most people it will never have the impact of intentionally winning a jar full of jellybeans.
So I ask you, LW-readership: what other impressive nonmagical powers do we have, that we can casually demonstrate to everyday people in everyday circumstances?
I am participating in a just-for-fun soccer prediction game with friends, where one gets awarded points for correctly predicted results or tendencies. In the beginning, I relied on gut feeling and information from soccer news sites like everyone else, and performed pretty badly. After a while, I implemented a simple script that takes quotes from betfair.com, a prediction market for sports, and calculates the prediction with highest expected points. Since then, I steadily climb the ladder.
I quite often go to find stock market proxies that might measure the significance of certain events. It helps to put bounds on things since the media generally places everything at Defcon 1 to attract attention. This rarely settles most or all questions you might have, and a lot of additional extrapolations are necessary, but can be of use.
Here is for instance, a Nuclear ETF. It might seemingly help to rule out the hypothesis of a substantial shift away from Nuclear to note that the value is in the range of just 6 months ago.
A couple of years ago my workplace was running one of those guess-the-number-of-jellybeans-in-the-jar competitions. I don't even like jellybeans all that much, but nonetheless, I held aloft my nonmagic calculator and said "by the power of Galton!" Taking the mean of all the previous guesses, I put that down as my answer. I was out by one bean, and won the jar. I don't think my colleagues have ever been so interested in statistics as they were that afternoon, and I doubt they ever will be again.
I'm going to admit something a bit silly and embarrassing now: that made me feel like a wizard. Not because of the scope of what I'd done, since it was an utterly trivial piece of arithmetic, but because of the reaction it got. I had drawn on arcane lore unknown to my colleagues, and used it to exercise power over the world.
Personally, I think something like solid state semiconductor technology is about as impressive a real-world miracle as one could ever want by way of demonstrating the whole Science Works/Rationality Is Systematised Winning/Maths Has Manifold Real-World Applications thing, but for most people it will never have the impact of intentionally winning a jar full of jellybeans.
So I ask you, LW-readership: what other impressive nonmagical powers do we have, that we can casually demonstrate to everyday people in everyday circumstances?