“75% chance of rain”:

1. It will definitely rain, on 75% of the relevant area.

2. It will definitely rain, for 75% of the relevant time period.

3. It will rain with an intensity of 75% of the maximum our instruments can measure.

4. Three out of four meteorologists think it will rain.

5. It will rain on 75% of the population.

6. It will rain on everyone, but 75% of the population forgot their umbrella.

7. It will rai

8. 25% chance of dry.

9. 25% chance of snow.

10. When you become trapped in a Groundhog Day-type loop and are forced to repeat today three more times, then a subsequent analysis will show that it rained on exactly three of the four total days. Probably.

11. The betting pool amongst meteorologists has 3:1 odds for rain.

4:1

I know what you did here. I am taking my Mg/K supplements to keep up my attention.

Why is it 4:1 instead of 3:1?

3:1 means that you bet $1 four times on the 25%, lose money three times and make back $3 the last time.

With how much the weather has messed with me lately, it seems that weather predictions mean all of these at once.

For related reasons, I like the blog's claim that much of the difficulty in establishing whether the proposition is true or not is because none of the wealth of literature on attention span was in the form of long term studies. Perhaps the researchers got bored and moved on to something else!

I know that HN is maybe not a place for such comments, but I strongly belive we need to make "attention span overflow" a thing

(I'm not sure if you were joking or not and I know it's probably not in the same spirit you intended it here / a bit OT but...) I've been using literally that exact expression for a while to describe the situation in which, during somewhat complex discussions within a group, in order to not be perceived as jerks participants are forced to follow an unnecessarily long, repetitive, trivial and most often also completely pointless "line of reasoning" just to have their own attention completely derailed from any productive/actually-interesting argument anyone was trying to make, often ultimately resulting in giving up because recalling those lost mental threads is by then even more difficult and there is only so much mental energy (for you and collectively) to dedicate to that discussion.

Just saying, imho it's already a thing (with different incarnations in different contexts).

Was this a joke? The mega sentence would seem to be perfect example of your point.

This is definitely a thing, but at least in my experience, it is also a thing that narcissists do. They can dig up emails and examples from the dark caverns where you were just having a water cooler chat, and they somehow took it as very serious and something you should have meant to defend if it left your lips.

Attention span overflow. ;)