* * * * *
                                        
    A plane flying 100 miles per hour and carrying 200 passengers and 5 crew
 crashes on the border of the United States and Canada. Where do they bury the
                                   survivors?
                                        
> Frederick is perhaps best known for creating the “Cognitive Reflection
> Test,” a simple measure for whether a person solves a problem “quickly with
> little conscious deliberation” or through reflective, slow thinking.
> Kahneman includes the test in his book.
> 
> It has three questions:
> 
> 1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How
> much does the ball cost? ____cents
> 
> 2) If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long
> would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? ____minutes
> 
> 3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles
> in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how
> long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? ____days
> 

Via Hacker News [1], “The power of slow thinking - Ideas - The Boston Globe
[2]”

I will say, I got the first one wrong initially—Oh! It's simple! It's 10¢!
But then I thought, Wait! This is a trick! Read that question slowly again … 
and I was able to puzzle it out. The second one I had to puzzle it out a few
times to get it right, but because I program (I work with powers of two all
the time) the last one was trivial.

When I tried asking Bunny about these, we had the following conversation:

“I was never good at these type of problems. You know, a train leaves Detroit
going at 75 miles per hour, while at the same time, a train leaves Los
Angeles going at 80 miles per hour. Where do they meet?”

“Yeah, that's easy.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, they meet head-on.”

“Ha ha ha. Where?

“D'uh! In the United States.”

“Ahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg!”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9952875
[2] https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/07/25/the-power

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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