John Carlos Baez on Nostr: @roryreckons.bsky.social writes: "The question "What do 2 and 7 have in common?" on ...

@roryreckons.bsky.social writes:

"The question "What do 2 and 7 have in common?" on autism tests is extremely interesting in the responses, and relates to differences in reasoning. I will discuss these in this thread, but think about it for a second.

1) The most common neurotypical response is that they are both numbers, which relies on broad categorisation.

2) Autistic people usually discuss either shape, their mathematical significance (primes, factors of 14, roman numerals), rotation, angles etc instead of the most broad category.

When asked this question, it never occurred to me that they would be asking about whether they are numbers. It's obvious they are numbers to me, that isn't where I would start to look for similarities.

Autistic people tend to use bottom-up processing, and neurotypicals top-down. So, the neurotypical expectation if someone asked you this question would be "they are numbers"

If you replied with something else, they would likely indicate that this showed a deficit on your part for not picking the most "obvious" answer, or imply you are being pedantic. But I feel like it's generally insulting to my intelligence to assume that I didn't already know they are numbers, and that pointing that out might be insulting the intelligence of the person I was talking to also."

As for me, "they're both numbers" was way too obvious to dream of answering that way. Like:

Q: What do a duck and platypus have in common?
A: They're both animals.

Duh!

Since I'm a mathematician, it's also rather dull to say 2 and 7 are both prime numbers. Okay, it's acceptable - but are too many primes for it to be interesting.

So I set out looking for a better answer.

(1/2)