Innumeracy

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Well, someone could leave after an hour, then go right back in and get the full 20% savings on each new hour.

[nimretred]

Originally Posted by The Drunken Actuary

Ouch.

I have someone working for me who likes to leave off significant digits when rounding if the digit is a 0 (1.99 round to 2 instead of 2.0). But nothing this bad.

I'm not sure I follow this, are you talking about formatting? On a spreadsheet or in a text report? Because 1.99 rounds to 2.0 (with one decimal) or to 2 (with no decimals); or you can just leave it as 1.99 depending on how you usually present whatever numbers you're presenting.

Just curious what the problem is, I have standard templates where everything gets reported with the exact amount of decimals I consider necessary, and rounding has really never been a problem I've had to care about... Until now, maybe

[Mel-o-rama]

In some environments, 2 is completely different than 2.0

The first is an "integer," and the second is a "real." That is, the ".0" at the end indicates it has digits after the decimal and is thus a real. You can get different results when you do math ...

5.0/2.0 = 2.5 ("real" math)

but 5/2 = 2 ("integer" math - drop the remainder)

[The Drunken Actuary]

Originally Posted by nimretred

I'm not sure I follow this, are you talking about formatting? On a spreadsheet or in a text report? Because 1.99 rounds to 2.0 (with one decimal) or to 2 (with no decimals); or you can just leave it as 1.99 depending on how you usually present whatever numbers you're presenting.

Just curious what the problem is, I have standard templates where everything gets reported with the exact amount of decimals I consider necessary, and rounding has really never been a problem I've had to care about... Until now, maybe

Yeah, I'm talking about formatting. There are a couple things we do that require manual labels and those labels have numbers rounded to one decimal. For example, we show $1,832,980 and $1.8M. Well, this guy does it correctly to one decimal unless that decimal is a 0 in which case he drops it. So he will round 1,987,675 to 2M instead of 2.0M. I like to include the 0 because all the other numbers are rounded to the nearest 100,000 so the 0 needs to be there for consistency. And since I'm the boss, he should do it my way.

[SamTheEagle]

I bet the chick in your avatar would do it right if you hired her.

[Rockhound]

Originally Posted by MountainHawk

Once had a CEO round a 1.8% quarterly growth rate by saying: 1.8% a quarter is 0.6% a month, rounds to 1% a month so that's 12% a year to be able to show a 'green light' next to the 10% growth target.

That's not innumeracy. That's f***'n genius!! So so year, but made his bonus!

[Heywood J]

Originally Posted by The Drunken Actuary

Yeah, I'm talking about formatting. There are a couple things we do that require manual labels and those labels have numbers rounded to one decimal. For example, we show $1,832,980 and $1.8M. Well, this guy does it correctly to one decimal unless that decimal is a 0 in which case he drops it. So he will round 1,987,675 to 2M instead of 2.0M. I like to include the 0 because all the other numbers are rounded to the nearest 100,000 so the 0 needs to be there for consistency. And since I'm the boss, he should do it my way.

It's not just a consistency thing, it's a proper communication thing. When you say $2M, you may mean any figure between $1,500,000 and $2,499,999. Obviously that's not really the case if you're actually rounding to the nearest 100,000. Significant digits are not a trivial matter.

[The Drunken Actuary]

Originally Posted by Heywood J

It's not just a consistency thing, it's a proper communication thing. When you say $2M, you may mean any figure between $1,500,000 and $2,499,999. Obviously that's not really the case if you're actually rounding to the nearest 100,000. Significant digits are not a trivial matter.

I had actually posted the bolded then edited the post and removed that part, so yeah, I agree.

[The Drunken Actuary]

Originally Posted by SamTheEagle

I bet the chick in your avatar would do it right if you hired her.

She wouldn't have time to do math. I'd have her working on special projects.

[Mel-o-rama]

I guess two is plural.