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Comment by bmn__ | Hacker News Reader

Because it's enormously abnormal to remember such a useless fact.

You would remember just from cleaning them and thus knowing how much work remains repeatedly.

I would know how much work remains by visualizing the uncleaned windows in my apartment.

That does not imply it is abnormal to remember overall number after you visualized it few times. I would even argue it is abnormal to not remember result of calculation you have done multiple times.

It's a useless number. People don't tend to remember useless numbers they can recalculate with no effort. Same with the number of doors or plants.

And they also don't need to visualise whole house to get that number. That strikes me as the more absurd way of finding the number even when you are calculating it.

Can't argue with that. It's just easier to visualize a complete city with all the houses inside of that city than it is to remember a useless number. At least for me. Text is hard for me to remember, pictures aren't.

So count something you see, but dont interact with? Most people do not count and rememeber every object in their homes. The point is to illustrate that some people dont have working 3D models in their minds, not to argue about what method for remembering is easiest for you.

You do interact with window every time you clean it. Is it someone else who cleans where you live? If yes and you dont pay them, you should participate in cleaning too.

You do interact with windows every time you check they are all closed before leaving for holidays or weekend. Every time you close it and open it. Most people have small number of rooms and exactly one occasionally two windows in it. We are not talking about how many books you have nor anything like that. We are talking about large visible objects that are few in numbers you interact with fairly often.

Also, the point was not to illustrate point, the point was to diagnose visualization problem based on remembering number of windows.

Even when interacting, why would you count them?

You don't need to consiously count them to remember how many of them are.

Plus, while cleaning them or checking whethe they are closed, you will be like "two done, three to go" enough times to remember "five".

Not really. I think "two rooms to go", not "x windows to go". There's no point in counting or adding, so I don't bother. Also, I only clean my windows once a year, if that. There's an hilarious story about a spider family having bred on the other side of a closed window I hadn't opened all year. That must have been at least 500 spiders. It was hard to even look through the window, so I eventually bothered to clean that one early. Maybe a mistake, seeing how half of those spiders than entered into my room, but, whatever. I don't mind spiders.

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