Wednesday, July 29, 2026

The Temperature Magician

In a recent posting titled "Sharpening", I wrote:
Many people can guess the current time to the minute whenever they pop awake in the middle of the night. It feels like a superpower, but it's not.

Whenever a cashier adds you up, flash a total. Don't calculate. Don't try to be right. Just quietly flash a number, with zero effort. Pretty soon you'll get super good at it.

Whenever you check anything, flash a result. Nothing obsessive or emotionally fraught. Don't be like a daft compulsive gambler trying to game absolutely everything. Just flash a result, calmly, and see how you do. Then don't give it another thought. Let subconscious calibration happen.

Keep this up as a long game, and you'll get like Nostradamus.

I bought a bunch of cheap little temperature and humidity sensors from Xiaomi, and left one in every room. Mostly to help decide if I really need AC, and to track effectiveness of open/closed blinds and fan placements.

When I enter a room, I guess the temperature, very informally, and then glance at the thermometer. How many iterations would you imagine it took to get within half a degree? 1000? 10,000?

No, more like 15. After 15 iterations, I was usually surprisingly right, though occasionally dead wrong.

After 200, I was not much righter, but dead wrong slightly less.

Now, after 1000, I'm about the same. After a billion, I'd expect any improvement to be hardly noticeable (unless, perhaps, I managed to maintain a fresh sense of discovery as the process becomes tediously routine).


Related: Confusion Isn’t Infinity, it’s Twelve (or Three)

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