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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

The author is asking for overly-precise numbers in scientific papers, because the science data publishing/sharing/reproducibility process is broken.

I won't argue against this specific case. But in almost any other context, I think comprehension would be better served with zero significant digits, or at most 1. This is one reason that I propose magnitude notation: https://saul.pw/mag.

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I kind of like where you're going with that, it can be frustrating when we use worse notation due to historical accidents (see also, perhaps: direction of conventional current flow, pi vs tau, all the bad differentiation syntaxes).

Also, thinking in terms of log quantities makes me think of Fermi estimation, which I love.

But dropping units seems mad to me! From the page:

   For instance, “10 million kWh” becomes “↑13.6”

↑13.6 what!?

But then I'm a proponent that people should use WAY MORE units every day. Almost every number should have a unit after it. If I'm estimating how many people live on a street it should always be: "10 [houses] x 2.5 [people/house]" not "10 x 2.5".

Oops! That was an error of manual conversion. The actual plugin converts it to "↑13.6 joules". Thanks for spotting, fixed it!

Outside of science people invent random units, they just say three football fields or 70 school busses. Which works just fine, aside from taking effort to write and maybe making some readers feel insulted.

Anytime you actually need to do anything with a number, you usually need more precision, and any new notation breaks the ability to copy and paste to a calculator, until all the calculators get support.

Yes, that's currently what people do (including journalists and science explainers), and it does not work just fine. In fact it's kind of unbelievable that an intelligent and educated person would defend "inventing random units" as an acceptable tactic. I mean even just from your example, which is bigger, 3 football fields or 70 school buses?

And actually, anytime I need to do anything with a number, I either use a computer (in which case I'm not entering in the numbers manually), or I don't need more precision. In fact more precision completely gets in the way.

Also, we have an existing "scientific notation", which is completely incapable of being copy-pasted into any calculator I've ever used.

I have no idea which one is actually bigger, even if I did know whether a school bus is a unit of weight or length or people or money...

But it works fine for the intended audience and purpose, which is usually to give a very vague idea without assuming any specialized knowledge. If they wanted to enable real reasoning with the data(which they probably should) then they could just give the actual number, in full precision.

I would imagine a lot of this is just an individual thing. Some people make real decisions with mental arithmetic on a regular basis, others almost never encounter math outside of a screen, because apps have taken over a lot of the stuff that used to be done mentally.

Notation is in the data repository. Exposition is for understanding.

>Outside of science people invent random units, they just say three football fields or 70 school busses. Which works just fine, aside from taking effort to write and maybe making some readers feel insulted.

Is this something people do? I only saw this in English (American I guess) online articles.

I like your Mag World initiative. I had a similar idea… we should reform / simplify how units are dealt with

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