the_12_Ex

An Example About Peanuts That I Initially Misunderstood *Shortform Post* I want to write down a small example from a recent conversation, mostly because I noticed I misunderstood it the first time, and that misunderstanding seems worth keeping. A colleague was explaining something using a very simple setup. There are five peanuts on a table. If you ask a three-year-old how many there are, the child will usually count them one by one. An adult will typically answer “five” immediately. At first, I didn’t think much of this. I assumed the point was just that adults are faster at recognizing small quantities. Then he changed the setup slightly. Imagine there are more than twenty peanuts on the table. Now I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the number at a glance either. My immediate conclusion was: intuition works for small numbers, but fails once things get large. He said that wasn’t the right way to think about it. What mattered, he said, wasn’t the number of peanuts, but where you are relative to the situation. If I were “standing high enough” — in the same sense that I’m standing outside when watching a child count — I might once again see the quantity immediately. This wasn’t obvious to me at first, and I had to sit with it for a bit. He gave another example. Five people are sitting at a table. When a waiter suddenly asks, “How many people are here?”, I often find myself counting. Not because five is large, but because I’m inside the scene rather than observing it from outside. At this point I realized my original takeaway was mixing two different things together. One was about scale. The other was about perspective. Later, somewhat playfully, I asked what would happen if you covered the peanuts with a bowl and asked how many were underneath. The answer was simple: you can’t know. Not because humans are bad at counting, but because the relevant information just isn’t accessible. He then contrasted this with an AI system. If you give it sensors — weight