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Comment by fjh | Hacker News Reader

Minor point, but if you are using factual questions to filter out stupid people, asking for the "right" number of continents is probably not ideal. You (and I) might disagree with someone counting Eurasia (or North and South America) as a single continent, but it is not really an indicator of stupidity in the way that believing in astrology or thinking the earth is larger than the sun are.

According to the wikipedia article on continents, different models are taught in different countries, so you probably end up selecting for a different attribute than you thought.

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People I don’t want to date: Anyone who gets hung up on arbitrary definitions and is ignorant of other cultures.

That questions seems to be a pretty good filter, just not for the reasons he thinks it is.

(As I child – not in school but before – I learned that there are five continents: Africa, Australia, America, Asia, Europe. I don’t think I was ever told in school how many continents there are. All we were told were names of certain landmasses to make sure we are all talking about the same thing when saying America, Antarctica, South America or Eurasia. Why bother counting them? That doesn’t even make sense.)

See, but if you made that question mandatory, you'd weed out me, because I was taught in a different school in (probably) different country, and my set of default continents is different.

OTOH, I think I marked this question as irrelevant.

I wonder if the question exists just to filter out people who don't mark it as irrelevant.

Seems odd to separate Asia from Europe and not separate North and South America. I mean Eurasia is even on the same plate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg

But, I expect when they start teaching people which plates things are on plenty of people are going to find it strange.

I think you didn’t understand me. That’s not what matters. There is no need to count continents. It’s unnecessary.

If you know every property of something it’s not necessary to ask whether it really is a continent or not.

There isn’t even a communication problem when it comes to this question so it isn’t really necessary to find some sort of great definition.

No matter how many continents you told there were, if you payed some attention you know what people are talking about when they say America, North America, Europe, Asia or Eurasia.

That part actually surprised me quite a bit. I was taught in school that there are five continents (Eurasia, Africa, America, Antarctica, Oceania). I was also told that this is an arbitrary and unimportant definition, but I've always believed that to be the common convention.

I'd go even further: even the astrology question is not a good indicator of stupidity or compatibility.

There are lots of otherwise smart people who believe in "stupid" things. For example, in Japan many people believe that your blood type is an indicator of your personality. I'm talking about educated people.

So, there are many women who are interested in astrology. Some don't really believe that astrology is scientific, but they read the horoscope column anyway. Unless she takes it seriously and makes life/relationship decisions based on it, I wouldn't consider it a deal-breaker.

The question is worded "Do you consider astrology to be a legitimate science?". So if you answered "Yes", you're an idiot in my book.

I wouldn't consider somebody an idiot if they misunderstood the word as astronomy. That seems like the kind of mistake normal people might make occasionally.

Many, many years ago I had a girlfriend who I adored because she was a wonderful musician. She had loads of conflicting crackpot spiritual opinions that we argued about, but I didn't care. It was fun whilst it lasted. It wasn't going to last, and I knew that and didn't mind because I liked being with her in the meantime.

I still have the astrology chart she drew for me.

I didn't know I didn't care about the nutty side until I met her.

I wouldn't have met her via this algorithm.

Just saying.

OK, so -- the point of the article is not (1) whether astrology is a science, (2) that there are 7 continents, (3) whether the sun is bigger than the Earth, or (4) whether any of those are good filters on dates.

It's about the general principle that (a) OKC should make Mandatory questions only count as negatives, and (b) unless they do that, users shouldn't make "factual" questions including (1, 2, 3) mandatory.

Maybe they shouldn't have been mandatory in the first place because you can love someone who believes wrong facts, that's a valid point as well but doesn't relate to the algorithm design issues.

But on OKC you can choose to consider multiple answers as "right". So if you want to make 5 or 6 continents acceptable answers, you can do so.

Given that the range of "right" answers is 4-7, that really only filters out people who respond <=3 or >=8. That's not much of a filter, and people who failed it would quickly be outed as not all that bright anyway. I agree with those saying it's not a great question to put any weight on.

>thinking the earth is larger than the sun are [is] an indicator of stupidity

The question is "which is bigger: the Earth or the Sun?". It doesn't specify how to measure big, so when answering the question I decided to consider angular size and answered that the Earth is the larger of the two.

Now you're just arguing for the sake of argument and throwing in semantics.

I could also say that I am bigger than the Sun because whenever I see the Sun it is only around 3 inches in diameter while I am 5 feet 11 inches. But that is a completely dumb statement, and so is yours.

It's a dating site. The point is to have fun and meet like-minded people.

Well, what is more likely: That people are answering the question that way because they are wise-cracking or just because they are stupid?

As such, for people that don't like geeks who interpret everything literally, answering "the sun" might be a good strategy, as I doubt anyone else would make this question mandatory.

It's true, but that's a valid way to approach the question. The problem is that grandparent will have more misses (people who legitimately believe that the earth is larger than the sun by the assumed metric) than hits (people who think outside of the box by using a different metric).

Actually, a lot of people use the "what's more directly relevant to me" metric. Thus, you have a lot of people who pick "earth" as an answer even though they are not delusional. At least not in this specific way.

If you were looking at a painting it would sometimes not be stupid at all to say "the house is bigger than the sun"

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