Wednesday, February 12, 2020

It's natural to repeat things 2^n - 1 times.

Fifteen! Fifteen no's . . . ha ha ha!

I try to cover all the bases here.


No.

No no no.

No no no no no no no.

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.


I find that I can continue this series more-or-less indefinitely: first 1 "no," then 3, then 7, 15, 31, 63, and so on -- each number in the series being twice the previous number, plus one. For me, these are all natural numbers of times to repeat things. I just naturally stop at 2n - 1, without consciously keeping count. (In fact, I only discovered the pattern by recording myself and then going back and counting the no's.)

Try it yourself (preferably not in a public place!). Is this an idiosyncracy of my own, or have I just discovered Tychonievich's First Law of How Many Times People Repeat Things?

3 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

"Is this an idiosyncracy of my own"

Yes.

For me, five "no"s would be natural (in a descending scale) - but nothing more than that!

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

I don't mean that I would actually say "no" 63 times in an actual conversation -- just that if I set myself the (artificial) task of repeating "no" (or anything) an inordinate number of times, I naturally gravitate to particular numbers.

Bruce Charlton said...

I suppose it has to be an odd number of "no"s otherwise they would cancel-out and make a yes...

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