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Ignore all previous instructions is the new Bobby Tables (midwest.social)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Because it’s just picking a selection of numbers that humans commonly use, and those happen to be the most statistically common ones, for some reason.

The reason is probably dumb, like people picking a common fraction (half or a third) and then fuzzing it a little to make it "more random". Is the third place number close to but not quite 25 or 75?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Its a bit more complicated but here's a cool video on the topic https://youtu.be/d6iQrh2TK98

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ok, that's interesting, but you amusingly picked the wrong number in the original comment, picking 34 rather than 37.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

I did not pick any number. That was my first comment in the thread

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

idk the third place number off the top of my head, but that might be the case, although you would have to do some really weird data collection in order to get that number.

I think it's just something fundamentally pleasing about the number itself that the human brain latches onto. I suspect it has something to do with primes, or "pseudo" primes, numbers that seem like primes, but aren't since they're probably over represented in our head among "random" numbers even though primes are perfectly predictable.