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Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere a long time ago that when asked to pick a random number between 1 and 10, people are way more likely to pick 7 than anything else

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I've confirmed this experimentally. (As in, I asked a bunch of people to "pick a number from 1 to 10").

But that was a long time ago, and I wonder if the common knowledge that '7' is the most popular would sway people to avoid it. I know I do. I should re-run this.

In any case, it's clear that 7 is the most random digit, right? The other digits are either even or otherwise "nice". 7 is chaotic and unpredictable. 7 sells loose cigarettes to middle school kids. 7 will leave the shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. Of all the digits in [1-10], it's 7 who'll more likely than not be the one who left the bathroom stall without flushing.

It's easy to draw a shape with 3 (triangle), 4 (square), 5 (pentagon or star shape), 6 (2 overlapping triangles), 8 (2 overlapping squares), 9 (3 overlapping triangles), and 10 (2 overlapping pentagons) sides; but a seven sided shape? Screw that.

You just reminded me of something from when I worked at a pizza place. Most of the time we sold pizzas cut the normal way. Either 6, 8, or 10 slices using a circular cutter. The normal style you might have in your kitchen.

But one Wednesday each month, we had a massive lunch order for a local school. Hundreds of individually-boxed slices, delivered just before 11:30. The slice box was sized for a 1/7 slice of our extra large pizza. We had to use a "wagon wheel" type slicer for those. It was a huge stainless thing that must've cost a fortune.

I always wondered why it was 7 slices and not 6 or 8. The best theory I could come up with was that these slices all had to be the exact same size; no variance from sloppy cutting. And the only way to ensure that would be to specify it as an odd number to make it impractical for the normal cutter.

Did you have to use a different cheese as well? My brief stint in the field had us dragging out school district special cheese and a wagon wheel cutter as well (although it was 8 pieces). I can only assume that you're correct about strict tolerances in slice size. My. imagination creates a scenario where somebody got a small slice once and somebody overzealously mandated more equality.

I don't think so. I was a delivery driver and so was also responsible for pulling the pizzas off the end of the oven conveyor, slicing them, and boxing them, so I can't be sure if some special government cheese was used in the prep line. But my memory of the pizzas was that they were the same, just sliced different.

A pentagon is one of the hardest things to draw well.

Draw a five pointed triangle (use the golden ratio if you can't do it by hand) and then connect the points. Pentagon!

> five pointed triangle

:-)

Oh, right. In my mind a 5 pointed star is made up of 5 triangles, each in a 1.618 ratio, so I mixed up star and triangle in my mind.

Your username fits you well, sir.

When asked to "pick a number" or "pick a random number" why should people avoid the popular 7 or 17 ? What property you are expecting them to hit when you ask this question?

Also:

why was six afraid of seven? because seven ate nine

Well when someone is asking me for a random digit, the last thing I want to be is predictable! To avoid the shame and embarrassment of being basic, I go with 2. Or maybe 9. Depends on my mood.

Maybe if you ask for an unpredictable number, you might get different answers.

Seven ate nine because it needs it's three squared meals a day.

I guess there's more to the story of why 6 is afraid of 7..

I wonder if it's a feeling like this:

You feel like 1 - 5 are very familiar to you. You've known those numbers the most out of all of them. So you'd rather pick 5-10 which seem more spontaneous and mysterious. Your balance mechanism kicks in and you want to choose something that is in the middle. You choose seven because 7.5 is the actual middle and hey, there's a 7 in that number so let's do that.

That might explain why Data's lockout code in that particular TNG episode has so many "7" on it :)

One, seven, three, four, six, seven, three, two, one, four, seven, six, Charlie, three, two, seven, eight, nine, seven, seven, seven, six, four, three, Tango, seven, three, two, Victor, seven, three, one, one, seven, eight, eight, eight, seven, three, two, four, seven, six, seven, eight, nine, seven, six, four, three, seven, six. Lock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERApU26PcA

On the other hand, the emergency number from IT Crowd only had one 7.

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