Yesterday’s XKCD comic got my brother’s attention. He said it highlighted what he believed to be a human tendency to underestimate the sum of a large group of small numbers. I’m inclined to agree with him that this is a real tendency. I see it every week when I fill my grocery cart with items that cost just a couple of bucks each, and somehow the grand total magically ends up past $100, or when my monthly credit card bill comes due and all those little charges add up to a damn big number.
So are we right? Is this a real, documented human tendency?
I work in musical theater as a music director, and this sort of thing happens all the time in rehearsals.
We’ll have to go back to some point in a song. I’ll suggest an easy spot to pick it up, and the director will say, “no, that’s too far back, we don’t need to go back that far, how about from, uh . . . uh . . . here?” At which point we’ve already used up the time “saved” by starting closer to the problem point, and I haven’t even figured out how to explain to the actors which mid-phrase place we’re going to start at.
There are very few situations in that context where you save time by zeroing in precisely, but directors seem to have an obsessive thing about not wanting to waste time by running sections that don’t need running, so they don’t realize how much time they end up wasting by choosing and then explaining their complicated solution.