(not OP) The other day I was doing some accounting calculations as part of a tense negotiation about accounting procedures for a shared project. I suppose, in retrospect, my emotions at the time, that were helping drive me to stay at the work, could have been described in part as "hurt", "afraid", "aggrieved", and "vindictive", and even a little bit "reverse-vicariously spiteful".
One of the major quantities that differed between my proposed accounting procedures and the other party's turned out in my version to contain seven 6's in a row: $[...]66.66666[...]. While three of those 6's were fractional cents, it wasn't just a matter of a repeating decimal like 100*2/3 getting rounded badly. If it had just been that, I wouldn't have given it a second thought; the accounting procedure naturally produces whole-number-fraction amounts of cents. But the spreadsheet used 15 digits of precision, and that was more than enough buffer against roundoff error reaching all the way to the sixth decimal.
Instead, it looks like some of the rational numbers involved had created a close cancellation, such as in 100*(2/3 + 1/n - 1/(n+1)), which equals 100*(2/3 + 1/(n^2+n))). I guess that's not completely surprising; it doesn't have quite the full "a few in ten million" odds against, that you'd expect in the case of finding seven 6's in a row in a perfectly random number.
But it's still striking enough that I'm still not sure what to make of it. The number has almost as many 6's in a row as it possibly could have had, short of causing me to dismiss it as just the result of dividing something by 3. I don't really have a standard set of number subjective associations to interpret it with, and it felt like it would be extraneous to just paste on Western numerology after the fact. But now, during the next MM while the incident is still on my mind, I see someone else asking you about a less significant number of 6's in a USD quantity, so I'm open to suggestions. Even if your suggestion is just "look up the standard Western symbolism for 7 and 6".
I sort of wonder in retrospect if the numbers were a cue that the task I thought I needed to do would turn out to be harmful, and that I should instead leave the negotiation outcome I was trying to protect against to fate, and pursue my aims for that task (or only some of them) in some other way. Or that the task would turn out to be harmful as long as I did it from out of that emotional state, even in the case where no other emotional state I knew how to get into would have worked to keep me at it.
One question I do have is, is there a standard way for someone to look at the emotional state from which they're doing a task, and tell whether their attachment to that emotional state is going to cause their efforts to produce harmful side effects? But then, people do things in bad states all the time. So how much does this depend on if the person might have some sort of power attached to them, from that life or some previous, that would cause harms with little or no conscious intention? Like that definition of "witch" you talk about, or like those stories about Elisha or Eliezer ben Hurcanus. Is there a standard way to get a read on that?
I don't understand how to weigh my potential responsibilities here, since I did arguably also have a responsibility to protect my position in that negotiation, and I wouldn't have wanted to refrain from completing the task frivolously on the basis of speculative considerations.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2023-11-21 12:11 am (UTC)One of the major quantities that differed between my proposed accounting procedures and the other party's turned out in my version to contain seven 6's in a row: $[...]66.66666[...]. While three of those 6's were fractional cents, it wasn't just a matter of a repeating decimal like 100*2/3 getting rounded badly. If it had just been that, I wouldn't have given it a second thought; the accounting procedure naturally produces whole-number-fraction amounts of cents. But the spreadsheet used 15 digits of precision, and that was more than enough buffer against roundoff error reaching all the way to the sixth decimal.
Instead, it looks like some of the rational numbers involved had created a close cancellation, such as in 100*(2/3 + 1/n - 1/(n+1)), which equals 100*(2/3 + 1/(n^2+n))). I guess that's not completely surprising; it doesn't have quite the full "a few in ten million" odds against, that you'd expect in the case of finding seven 6's in a row in a perfectly random number.
But it's still striking enough that I'm still not sure what to make of it. The number has almost as many 6's in a row as it possibly could have had, short of causing me to dismiss it as just the result of dividing something by 3. I don't really have a standard set of number subjective associations to interpret it with, and it felt like it would be extraneous to just paste on Western numerology after the fact. But now, during the next MM while the incident is still on my mind, I see someone else asking you about a less significant number of 6's in a USD quantity, so I'm open to suggestions. Even if your suggestion is just "look up the standard Western symbolism for 7 and 6".
I sort of wonder in retrospect if the numbers were a cue that the task I thought I needed to do would turn out to be harmful, and that I should instead leave the negotiation outcome I was trying to protect against to fate, and pursue my aims for that task (or only some of them) in some other way. Or that the task would turn out to be harmful as long as I did it from out of that emotional state, even in the case where no other emotional state I knew how to get into would have worked to keep me at it.
One question I do have is, is there a standard way for someone to look at the emotional state from which they're doing a task, and tell whether their attachment to that emotional state is going to cause their efforts to produce harmful side effects? But then, people do things in bad states all the time. So how much does this depend on if the person might have some sort of power attached to them, from that life or some previous, that would cause harms with little or no conscious intention? Like that definition of "witch" you talk about, or like those stories about Elisha or Eliezer ben Hurcanus. Is there a standard way to get a read on that?
I don't understand how to weigh my potential responsibilities here, since I did arguably also have a responsibility to protect my position in that negotiation, and I wouldn't have wanted to refrain from completing the task frivolously on the basis of speculative considerations.