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by jariel 2179 days ago
It was not about 'answering correctly' it was about perceptions.

From the first question forward, if one wanted to guess what the technically correct answer was, it was pretty straightforward.

The point wasn't to 'test' it was to get people to see how small artefacts can consistently shift our view of time.

There's no 'win' in answering the questions correctly.

1 comments

The date slider section was straightforwardly about 'answering correctly'. If you can ballpark all of these events to the right decade or so, further granularity is unlikely to be related to perceptual distortions about time.

Obvious example: the cassette question.

Question: When were storage devices for audio commonly known as cassette tapes introduced?

Expected answer: 1963.

If "introduced" is intended to be read as shorthand for "sold in a retail market", then this question has no single answer grounded in one person's life experience. I was recalling the year of invention when I answered[1].

Citing "the early 1960s" will be good enough for anyone having a conversation about tech history. The year of the first retail release certainly isn't interesting or worth keeping in your head. Worse, the 1960s weren't even the decade most strongly associated with cassette tapes.

So this is very much a neener-neener type of gotcha question.

[1]: https://files.catbox.moe/h7hcuh.png

Shouldn't the correct answer be "I don't care/I don't know" though? It's always a flaw of those quizzes to exclude the ignorant options. It produces noise in results.

Ask important questions rather than random trivia too. People really remember when they watched a movie, rather than when it was released. When they used a Walkman/CD player/MP3 player/game console, not when they were first made.

Biographic memory not random historical facts.

I definitely didn't get any "woah time has flown by" from any of these questions. I remembered the correct year for all of them except for the cassette tape which was made decades before I was born. I guessed the early 80ies, thinking of the Walkman, turns out that came out in 1979.