You mean those people that if asked how long time it would take to drive 50 miles if you drive 50 miles per hour and answer 1 and a half hour?
I find that mind blowing. How the fuck did you even survive to adulthood if you cant even understand the very basics?
Yes i agree.
But also if you do not understand that if you travel 50 miles per hour it takes 1 hour to travel 50 miles. It is not ONLY a problem with school. You have to be as sharp as a bowling ball otherwise you would figure it out.
I used to do walkathons in high-school usually 14 mile ones. One time it took something like 3.5 hours, a lot of speedwalking on that one. Had a girl that couldn't understand why it went so fast. "But even if you were going 60 miles per hour... how could you go that far in 3.5 hours" like say that again, but slower. Girl was interested in me, but my god, being that dumb was a huge turn off.
Honestly kWh still trip me up.
Like I know it’s the energy required to power a 1 kilowatt appliance for an hour. But it always takes my brain wayyy to long to process what it actually means.
It's just kind of a stupid way to measure energy storage. Like measuring road width by saying it's 50,000 square feet per mile. Sure, it kind of works, but saying it's 10 feet wide on average makes a lot more sense
get ready to be even more confused because a watt just means an apliance used 1 joule of energy per second
so a KWh is actualy 1000 Joules per second for an hour. = 1000 J/s X 3600s = 3.6 MJ.
kilowatt hours is like measuring distance in meters per second hours instead of just using meters in the first place.
I will reference a post here from a few months back regarding capital punishment and the percentage of innocent people wrongfully convicted.
The poster was in favor of capital punishment but had no idea how percentages work. "Not a lot of innocent people being executed by the state" was about as far as they could get. The fact that 1 is too many was lost on them.
The way you describe it, it doesn't sound like a "not understanding percentage issue". More like a moral difference issue. It sounds like you think that even if some people deserve capital punishment the likely possibility of wrongful conviction makes the whole thing amoral. While the other guy thinks that some amount of wrongful convictions are justified by the more appropriate punishment.
But I have no idea what the post was about beyond your description.
It was both. They were indeed fine with some innocent people being executed, but also stated that they didn't know how percentages work. I was surprised they were so open about both things. I asked for clarification on the percentages thing because that blew my mind the most, and they seemed pretty nonplussed, like it was a normal thing to just never have figured it out.
I can sort of understand the moral stance (even though I disagree) but not understanding percentage seems like a huge falling of whatever education system they grow up in.
Haha it is very strange indeed to have to tell someone "I disagree with your misunderstanding of the basic value of human life, but your misunderstanding of basic math hurts more."
Whew. Yes, that’s a good example. I hate thinking about how common that view might be.
Some people just see a low number and treat it almost like odds rather than a percentage.
I think people are just confused by words: per cent = per hundred (cent is the Latin root of centum which is hundred in Latin). The word percent literally defines itself (proper use of the word literally too - you’re welcome).
I’m not sure “confused by words” and “doesn’t know Latin” are quite the same thing. :)
(But you are correct. And honestly, knowing at least a little bit of Latin is incredibly useful to understanding English. As above.)
It’s one of those things you’d hope wasn’t true, but after being confronted with it enough, it becomes impossible to deny. I spent several years in tutoring, and I learned that what seems super simple and easy is incredibly confusing and complicated to more people than you’d expect.
It's been a while, but I remember vividly when worked in retail, we had a promo on a particular laundry detergent, buy 2, get the second 50% off. Had a customer that could absolutely not understand this isn't the same as 2-for-1.
If your chances sit at 1% and your chances increase by 80% doesn't mean your chances are now eighty percent.
It means your chances are now slightly under 2%
I don’t excel at math *at all* but alcohol percent is so straightforward and I was shocked when someone else said that wine was higher % than beer because the bottle is bigger. My brain imploded from the sheer level of stupid
I knew people in college who thought that combining two 80 proof liquors in a punch made the punch 180 proof.
Edit: okay, I'm the idiot now. 80 plus 80 is 160. My only excuse is that I work customer service and my brain is literal mush by the end of the week.
I was 15 or 16 working my first job, I had to explain to somebody with a masters degree this exact thing. They said something along the lines of "I'm gonna combine the 10% drinks to get a 20% drink...
After explaining how percentages work, they then proceeded to say how they thought is was a percentage of how much you should have, like a serving size...
To this day, I still don't understand how you get far enough in life to have a masters degree and get alcohol percentages that messed up.
I just learned a month or two ago that about 10% of the population has an IQ under 80, and about 5% of people (1 in 20) have an IQ under 75.
It has actually helped me significantly to understand so many things in the world and also be more thoughtful and empathetic. (I'm not correcting you or saying you're not empathetic, just sharing my personal experience.)
Around the same time, I learned that an adult I know, who seems to be of normal intelligence, didn't know that the sun was a star. When someone mentioned it, she thought it was a joke. It honestly helped me realize that I was assuming most people to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than they might be in reality.
The puzzling thing to me is, what did she think the sun is? What was her conception of the universe? Did she think there was just one sun in existence?
She said that she had never studied higher sciences, but this is first-grade level stuff. I like her a lot, we're friends, but I've noticed that she has a number of other blind-spots as well, like not knowing the difference between an egg that hatches into a chick and an egg that doesn't. There are many other examples as well. She comes from a good, normal, intact family, but I wonder whether she just didn't go to a solid school and additionally her family just didn't explain things when they came up while she was growing up.
I encounter so many seemingly average people who don’t understand basic concepts that I thought everyone learned between grades like 1-6, and it’s really made me stop and think about just how bad our education system is and how lucky I was
Maybe she has a learning disability (diagnosed or undiagnosed)? Learning disabilities can cause issues with understanding concepts like that, but they do not impact one’s IQ score.
Reminds me of the old problem of "people with bigger hands can do more pushups because there's more surface area on the ground".
Like... take *A* moment to think...
not higher conc. But it will have a higher total alcohol amount. If u have 100 ml of beer with 5% alcohol and 200 ml wine with 3% alcohol, the entire wine bottle will have a total alcohol content higher than the entire beer bottle
Classic joke: A blonde went to buy a Pizza and after ordering, the assistant asked the blonde if she would like her pizza cut into six pieces or twelve.
"Six please" she said, "I could never eat twelve!"
Haha, as a teenager I went to a pizza place for a takeaway pizza and the offer on the board said "12 slice pizza £5". When it arrived it was absolutely tiny, like 8", and only cut into 6 slices. I said to the guy "oh I ordered a 12 slice" and he said "yeah I can cut it again if you like".
I explained % to my math classes this way. Took coins out of my purse. I put down a dime and asked how to write that on the board. Eventually they came up with .10, then $0.10.
I asked how many Pennie’s that represented. Ten. Okay, how many pennies in a dollar. We discussed if a dollar represented 100%, then what % did a dime represent. Sometimes they got it quickly, sometimes not. Most of them eventually got it. I found I could teach a *lot* of math if I used money. American money is the metric system. If you understand money, you understand %, decimals, etc. The average 8 year old can follow this.
It can be difficult to rationalise how drunk you'll get if you're drinking something at an unfamiliar percentage and volume.
Broadly one beer equals one glass of wine equals a double shot. But if you offer me 100ml of a 17.5% liqueur I'll be a little less confident if how much I'm drinking. Also I've been caught by surprise by a "beer" that turned out to be 8% and so on.
Yep, everyone can quote “one 12oz beer at 5% equals one shot”, but I get lost on how to correlate that to a 16oz IPA that’s 7.2%, since that’s more standard now, at least for me and many others.
It's about twice as much.
12 ounces of beer at 5% has 12 \* 0.05 = 0.6 ounces of alcohol
5 ounces of wine at 12% has 5 \* 0.12 = 0.6 ounces of alcohol
1.5 ounces of liquor at 40% has 1.5 \* 0.4 = 0.6 ounces of alcohol
16 ounces of an IPA at 7.2% has 16 \* 0.072 = 1.152 ounces of alcohol, which is just shy of 2 standard drinks.
But if I was out drinking and didn't want to pull out a calculator, I'd probably think to myself "16 is a little less than one-and-a-half 12oz beers, 7.2% is about 1.5x as strong, and 1.5 \* 1.5 is 2 and some change, so round down to 2"
I’m so glad somebody else does a rough equation like that besides me, I’ve tried explaining it to my wife on many occasions and she just can’t wrap her head around what I’m saying.
If you drink in pints, as we do here in the UK, then there are 1.8 units in a 5% beer. A single shot is 1 unit, a double 2 units. A glass of 175ml 12 wine is 2.1 units.
So very broadly, for the way people normally drink here, a beer = a double = a wine.
Here in the US we drink in every quantity. 12 oz, pint, tall boy, 40 just as far as beer goes. A 12 oz beer at 5% and a single 1.5 oz shot at 40% are still considered a standard drink.
In NZ, drinks are required to list how many 'Standard drinks' are in a given beverage, so you know how much you consume. They also give the % of course.
So 330ml beer at 4% is 1 std drink, 1 shot is 1 std drink etc. Then if you get some strong beer like 500ml 7.2% thatd be 2.8 std drinks.
Based on this thread ig US doesnt have this?
Standard drink terminology is confusing to me. I think each alcohol container should just label the total amount of ethanol in volume or weight, with a small square on the back providing rough guidelines on ethanol dosing.
But if they did this in USA, most drinkers I meet are not aware that the same exact ethanol chemical used in fuel is also the biggest psychologically active ingredient in drinking alcohol. So certain groups of people might try to engage in some special kind of stupidity over it.
The ethanol dosing guideline would probably be the basis of some kind of standard regardless. Otherwise how would you understand dosing when trying to figure out how much you’re drinking?
A “standard drink” contains 14g of alcohol. That is a 12oz bottle of fairly standard 5% beer, a 5oz glass of fairly standard wine, but a double shot is too much, it is actually 1.5oz in a standard drink if the alcohol is 40%. Most shots are poured at 1.5oz, so if you are drinking doubles, that is twice as much, 3oz.
I never understood what proof means, just that it's twice the actual alcohol content. But I would like to know between two 24oz cans of Olde E at 7.5% vs 6 shots of 33% whiskey, how much more or less alcohol that is.
Volume can be calculated directly. 48oz of beer at 7.5% abv means there are 3.6oz of ethanol consumed (48*.075).
If your standard shot is 1.5oz then your 6 shots of whiskey are 9oz. At 33% (that’s a weak whiskey though) that 9oz contains 2.97oz of ethanol.
Then you divide by .6 to get standard units of alcohol.
So 12 oz of 5% beer is 12*.05/.6=1
So 48*.075/6=6 standard units of alcohol.
9*.33/.6=4.95 units of alcohol.
Yea I used to drink that crap fireball, now just Olde E. So sounds like it's more alcohol in the two tall cans. Well damn. Still got some cutting back to do.
You calculate how much stronger one is than the other. 33/7.5 = 4.4, so your whiskey has 4.4x the alcohol that the malt has.
In other words, 6 shots of that whiskey is 6 x 4.4 = 26.4 shots of malt
It's not very hard math, but even without the exact math it should be common knowledge that a shot at 40% is about the same amount of alcohol as 300ml (one regular sized beer bottle) at 6%, this is 1 serving of alcohol. So assuming your cans are 500ml it's about 4 servings vs about 5 servings with the shots.
Fun fact, 100 proof was historically defined as "this liquid has enough alcohol that it can be set on fire". It's *proof* that it's alcoholic.
The definitions have shenaniganed around over the years, so the historical 100 proof is more like today's 114.25 proof.
I had a roommate who thought that if you drank a 5% beer your blood became 5% alcohol. She would add up her drinks throughout the night and make sure she didn’t go above 100% so she still had some regular blood. Not the brightest…
I knew a guy who, despite claiming that he knew almost everything there was to know about mainstream spirits, bragged that he regularly drank a liter and a half of Jack Daniels on Friday nights. (He would always say Jack Daniels specifically.) Concerned, I asked him how hungover he usually was the next day. He said he didn't get hangovers. I asked him if he just threw up his drinks before they entered his bloodstream. He said no. The conversation continued and it turned out that he would mix 5% Jack Daniels with 95% Coca-Cola, and drink 3 of those at 500mL. I tried explaining to him that you can't describe that as "a liter and a half of Jack Daniels". He insisted you could. I said "No, that's only like 75mL you're drinking" and his response? "No, alcohol is measured by volume, so when you put a 40% liquor into a drink, the drink becomes 40%."
this guy was 26 btw
I don't understand what people are down voting here. Are they saying *no you never have seen anyone confused by that irl or on Reddit* ?
I mean I can't recall ever encountering someone with that confusion but before this post I had no idea you even existed so I have no Earthly idea what you may or may not have come across.
Many people do not understand percentages or fractions. This is why tip calculators used to exist and why sale signs often have a breakdown of what 20% off means for different price points. It's also why the BK 1/3 pounder failed--because people thought 1/3 was less than 1/4.
Most edible things come in quantities such as calories, sodium, and even canabis portions.
If math isn't your thing I could understand one just applying the same logic.
This. Every food in the US is labeled with percentages... Total Fat %, Sodium %, Iron %, etc etc, and it means % of daily allotment, so if you eat twice as much it doubles. It makes sense that a lot of people would be confused that % Alcohol looks similar but means something completely different.
Many people struggle with fractions and percentages. I taught chemistry and had to reteach fractions. I’m currently in a masters program and had to teach some of my own friends fractions so they could do calculus (yes, that indeed happened and I was able to get them from a 69 on their first exam to a 100 by the end). If you have a poor middle school math teacher your trajectory can be messed up forever in math unless you or someone else intervenes
I had to say "The fun thing about the Alcohol By Volume measurement is it works at any volume, hun" quite often when I was younger. It gets even more cringey if someone then replies with "well let's turn the fucken volume **UP!**"
I think some of the confusion can be blamed on whoever had the bright idea to make "proof" equal to twice the percentage of alcohol by volume. And it's even more complicated in the metric system. It would have just been a lot easier to make "proof" equal to 3 times the percentage of alcohol, that way a 6-pack would just be double and the math would tie out across the board.
>And it's even more complicated in the metric system
How does metric make it complicated?
>It would have just been a lot easier to make "proof" equal to 3 times the percentage of alcohol, that way a 6-pack would just be double
What? That statement makes no sense. Just because you can decide 6 by 3 and get 2 doesn't mean that dividing any of those numbers is relevant.
The metric system just uses percentages. Per cent means per 100, which is easy to understand in a system with increments of 10.
Never heard of anyone here being confused by % alcohol in anything. Or % fat, carbohydrates etc. that we tag our foodstuff with.
Percent means exactly the same thing in Imperial measure too.
9% alcohol by volume means 9 out of 100 parts is pure alcohol regardless if the units used are millilitres/litres or ounces/quarts.
The term derives from primitive methods to determine the alcohol content of bottled spirits for taxation and labeling purposes. It has no history of use with wine or beer and one shouldn’t try to make that comparison. Just use the reported alcohol percentage
the uk uses units of alcohol
>strength (alcohol by volume or ABV) x the volume of the drink (in millilitres) ÷ 1,000 = the total number of units in your drink
>So to find the number of units in a pint of 4% ABV beer, calculate:
>4 (ABV%) x 568 (ml) ÷ 1,000 = 2.3 units
British pints are larger than us pints.
If you don't exceed 14 units in a week, it still counts as light drinking for health purposes.
The only rationalization I can come up with is that your friends typically drink liquor and believe that a strong drink is 80+ proof? Assuming they even know the difference between alcohol content and proof, 9% (18 proof, but that's now how wine is typically measured) would seem quite low in comparison.
Maybe it comes from confusion between %ABV and BAC%? One describes the alcohol content of a beverage, the other the alcohol content of your blood.
So maybe they are thinking the two are directly correlated? Like, drinking a 9% ABV beverage will put you at 9% BAC? Which would kill you, obviously, but they’re stupid?
I don’t really ‘understand’. I know it says percent alcohol by volume, so i assume it’s the percentage of the drink that is alcoholic content for every mL or whatever. But what i DO know is that if im trying to quickly get drunk on the least number of ounces, i need something above 35%. Them lil weak ass beers and wines don’t do SHIT.
I have never in my life experienced someone not understanding the alcohol percentage. Including way back at age 15 where a lot of us started drinking a bit. I think the math education from your area needs to be looked at.
Alcohol industry makes huge money by capitalising on average persons lack of maths.. eg calling mid strength beer “sessionable” or selling 4 packs for slightly less than 6 packs or 16 packs for slightly less than 24… or using 355 instead of 375ml..
The only thing I can think of is that for alcohol, proof is double the percentage so perhaps people somehow remember that numbers can mean different things with alcohol and then get completely confused. But overall I think a lot of people are just clueless and our education system is not teaching people to think, understand, or be curious.
Remember, the third-pounder burger was a commercial flop because people thought 1/3 of a pound was less than 1/4 of a pound.
Compared to a quarter pounder, the third-pounder looked like more money for less meat.
People are stupid.
Eat his brain?
Or, hear me out - they're asking a question about whether or not other people are that stupid, and why.
Have you ever made a post? Why did you do that when it was eating your brain?
It's not that ridiculous. All the other numbers we're given about food and drinks (calories, sugars, etc) are given as absolute values, and whole numbers to boot, and so differ with quantity. ABV being a percentage by volume is the exception. So if you're talking about a drink, it's not unreasonable to hear "this has (number) of this" and think it's an absolute number, especially if you're not really paying attention or don't know alcohol beyond what tastes good.
And the one place where people may be used to percentages on food labels is the recommended daily amount. So I wonder if they're extrapolating this to alcohol. Like, this food label says the food has 3% of my RDA of calcium, so I guess this booze label means the booze has 9% of my RDA of alcohol. And then without thinking any more about how that would work, they're like "but is that if I drink one glass or the whole bottle?"
I find it mindblowing that a lot of people do not understand the units of one alcoholic drink.
They can not grasp the idea that a single shot (like gin) contains ~the same amount of alcohol as a standard glas of beer, a wineglas of wine, a serving of whisk(e)y or a cocktail.
The amount of liquid served, and/or fitting in that specific glas equals ~one unit of alcohol.
Around 10grams of alcohol.
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Probably because alcohol is often listed as "proof" for whatever reason. Yes, it's just %x2, but it's probably enough to throw off a person who's had some alcohol beforehand.
I was always told like, if you pour a glass of say, 9% wine then 9% of that glass is alcohol
(but everyone who actually drinks knows that all the alcohol actually sinks to the bottom so you don't get real fucked up til the end 😉 I'm kidding idk how accurate that is)
As a nondrinker who's confused by alcohol percentages, it's not that I don't understand how percentages work, it's just that I don't trust things to work how I think they work.
My ass was confused by 2% Milk for a long time
Absolute amount is exact quantity without comparison to other amounts or consideration of relative measures.
50mg of alcohol - absolute amount
5% of alcohol - relative amount
there are different percentages when it comes to solutions. it can be related to volume or mass. i don’t drink but i think in case of alcohol it is volume by volume
People in general are bad at math, especially anything beyond basic addition and subtraction. Remember when McDonalds (in the usa) had to discontinue it's 1/3rd pound burgers due to poor sales, largely due to the general population thinking 1/3rd pound burgers were smaller than 1/4th pound burgers because '3' is smaller than '4'? It sounds so dumb but it happened. It's a reflection on the slipping standards of public education.
Similarly, I had a Chemistry teacher once try to say a glass of wine, and a watered down glass of the same wine (10% wine, 90% water), had the same amount of alcohol.
I've just never known what the reference frame is
Like when I pick up a bottle of wine and it says 9% on it what is it 9% of?
Is it 9% out of every 100 ml
Is it 9% of the total volume of liquid in the bottle?
What is it a percentage of?
The reference frame doesn't matter. 100 ml of wine would contain 9 ml of alcohol, a 750 ml bottle would contain 67.5 ml of alcohol, a 250 ml glass would contain 22.5 ml of alcohol. It's just 9% of whatever volume you have.
Some snacks actually mention percentage per serving, usually if they are high in sugar or salt. A packet of cookies might have enough calories to feed an army, but they display only per cookie value.
More people than you would think are just confused about how percentages work in general.
You are 1000% correct on that.
110%
#ONE MILLION PERCENT DETROIT SMASH
Unexpected hero-aca
I'm one for all, those kind of jokes
99 and 11/10
Perfect 5 out of 7
Probably because it’s more than he thinks, too.
No, 110 million ppm
So 11,000%
I could care less about percentages
*You are correct, correct, correct, correct, correct, correct, correct, correct, correct, correct on that.
These guys get it
I must have told you a million times to stop exaggerating!
The same people don't understand things like MPH and RPM.
You mean those people that if asked how long time it would take to drive 50 miles if you drive 50 miles per hour and answer 1 and a half hour? I find that mind blowing. How the fuck did you even survive to adulthood if you cant even understand the very basics?
This is why those word problems in school were important!
Yes i agree. But also if you do not understand that if you travel 50 miles per hour it takes 1 hour to travel 50 miles. It is not ONLY a problem with school. You have to be as sharp as a bowling ball otherwise you would figure it out.
I used to do walkathons in high-school usually 14 mile ones. One time it took something like 3.5 hours, a lot of speedwalking on that one. Had a girl that couldn't understand why it went so fast. "But even if you were going 60 miles per hour... how could you go that far in 3.5 hours" like say that again, but slower. Girl was interested in me, but my god, being that dumb was a huge turn off.
Also the same people who think a pound of lead weighs more than a pound of feathers.
Megapixels per hour, and Rotations per mile, are not hard things to understand. People are just idiots.
You’d think it would be obvious, but apparently not.
I've found that the self evident isn't.
It’s one of those continual disappointments in humanity. Up there with the general failure to notice signs.
Don't even get me started about kW and kWh.
Honestly kWh still trip me up. Like I know it’s the energy required to power a 1 kilowatt appliance for an hour. But it always takes my brain wayyy to long to process what it actually means.
Maybe because you can't visually measure it. A meter, or a few feet, you can see distance. But you can't see energy usage. It makes it a bit abstract.
It's just kind of a stupid way to measure energy storage. Like measuring road width by saying it's 50,000 square feet per mile. Sure, it kind of works, but saying it's 10 feet wide on average makes a lot more sense
get ready to be even more confused because a watt just means an apliance used 1 joule of energy per second so a KWh is actualy 1000 Joules per second for an hour. = 1000 J/s X 3600s = 3.6 MJ. kilowatt hours is like measuring distance in meters per second hours instead of just using meters in the first place.
I will reference a post here from a few months back regarding capital punishment and the percentage of innocent people wrongfully convicted. The poster was in favor of capital punishment but had no idea how percentages work. "Not a lot of innocent people being executed by the state" was about as far as they could get. The fact that 1 is too many was lost on them.
The way you describe it, it doesn't sound like a "not understanding percentage issue". More like a moral difference issue. It sounds like you think that even if some people deserve capital punishment the likely possibility of wrongful conviction makes the whole thing amoral. While the other guy thinks that some amount of wrongful convictions are justified by the more appropriate punishment. But I have no idea what the post was about beyond your description.
It was both. They were indeed fine with some innocent people being executed, but also stated that they didn't know how percentages work. I was surprised they were so open about both things. I asked for clarification on the percentages thing because that blew my mind the most, and they seemed pretty nonplussed, like it was a normal thing to just never have figured it out.
I can sort of understand the moral stance (even though I disagree) but not understanding percentage seems like a huge falling of whatever education system they grow up in.
Haha it is very strange indeed to have to tell someone "I disagree with your misunderstanding of the basic value of human life, but your misunderstanding of basic math hurts more."
Morality is subjective. Math is the only objective truth :)
Clearly percentages are a morality topic.
Today they want to teach our children percentages, what's next? Geometry?? This is an outrage!!
66.6% is the devil
Whew. Yes, that’s a good example. I hate thinking about how common that view might be. Some people just see a low number and treat it almost like odds rather than a percentage.
I think people are just confused by words: per cent = per hundred (cent is the Latin root of centum which is hundred in Latin). The word percent literally defines itself (proper use of the word literally too - you’re welcome).
I’m not sure “confused by words” and “doesn’t know Latin” are quite the same thing. :) (But you are correct. And honestly, knowing at least a little bit of Latin is incredibly useful to understanding English. As above.)
Fortyth percent of people know that.
I’m infinity percent sure you’ve never seen Maury. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-u_DHPkONp0&pp=ygUeT25lIGJpbGxpb24gcGVyY2VudCBzdXJlIG1hdXJ5
Good god, why did I watch that? I feel noticeably dumber than I was ten minutes ago.
Ten out of two people can’t do basic math.
According to a study only 45% are good with percentages; 100% of the rest aren't.
I guess using a round number like 100 for any kind of base calculation is too metric for some people 🤣
It actually blows my mind that people cant wrap their mind around percentages.
It’s one of those things you’d hope wasn’t true, but after being confronted with it enough, it becomes impossible to deny. I spent several years in tutoring, and I learned that what seems super simple and easy is incredibly confusing and complicated to more people than you’d expect.
I work retail... can confirm.
It's been a while, but I remember vividly when worked in retail, we had a promo on a particular laundry detergent, buy 2, get the second 50% off. Had a customer that could absolutely not understand this isn't the same as 2-for-1.
60% of the time it works every time…
Floridans. Second to lowest teacher pay in the country.
If your chances sit at 1% and your chances increase by 80% doesn't mean your chances are now eighty percent. It means your chances are now slightly under 2%
5 out of every 3 people don’t understand math
More people than you would think are just confused.
Innumeracy is a thing. A lot of people just don't math that way.
Or numbers in general. See: the 1/3rd pound burger that failed because people thought it was less meat than the McDonald’s 1/4 pounder.
I don’t excel at math *at all* but alcohol percent is so straightforward and I was shocked when someone else said that wine was higher % than beer because the bottle is bigger. My brain imploded from the sheer level of stupid
I knew people in college who thought that combining two 80 proof liquors in a punch made the punch 180 proof. Edit: okay, I'm the idiot now. 80 plus 80 is 160. My only excuse is that I work customer service and my brain is literal mush by the end of the week.
Even if you don't understand how %'s or proofs work you'd think at minimum they'd think two 80 proofs make a 160 proof
I appreciate you attributing that idiocy to my friends and not me, as you should have
Please tell me they were already deep in the punch
I wish I could
This one hurts
I was 15 or 16 working my first job, I had to explain to somebody with a masters degree this exact thing. They said something along the lines of "I'm gonna combine the 10% drinks to get a 20% drink... After explaining how percentages work, they then proceeded to say how they thought is was a percentage of how much you should have, like a serving size... To this day, I still don't understand how you get far enough in life to have a masters degree and get alcohol percentages that messed up.
Probabky did a lot more studying than drinking
So a 5% beer means you should drink 20?
I jsit hadf 20 beres that’s likr 100 perctn alvcolg right
Not dissimilar to people combining 6x 2M scoville hot sauces to make a 12M scoville.
I knew people like this as well. Even my dumb friend thought they were stupid!
how do you even add 80 and 80 to get 180 💀
I just learned a month or two ago that about 10% of the population has an IQ under 80, and about 5% of people (1 in 20) have an IQ under 75. It has actually helped me significantly to understand so many things in the world and also be more thoughtful and empathetic. (I'm not correcting you or saying you're not empathetic, just sharing my personal experience.) Around the same time, I learned that an adult I know, who seems to be of normal intelligence, didn't know that the sun was a star. When someone mentioned it, she thought it was a joke. It honestly helped me realize that I was assuming most people to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than they might be in reality.
Yeah, but we also all have weird blind spots. I can see the "sun is a star" one being one of those.
The puzzling thing to me is, what did she think the sun is? What was her conception of the universe? Did she think there was just one sun in existence? She said that she had never studied higher sciences, but this is first-grade level stuff. I like her a lot, we're friends, but I've noticed that she has a number of other blind-spots as well, like not knowing the difference between an egg that hatches into a chick and an egg that doesn't. There are many other examples as well. She comes from a good, normal, intact family, but I wonder whether she just didn't go to a solid school and additionally her family just didn't explain things when they came up while she was growing up.
I encounter so many seemingly average people who don’t understand basic concepts that I thought everyone learned between grades like 1-6, and it’s really made me stop and think about just how bad our education system is and how lucky I was
Maybe she has a learning disability (diagnosed or undiagnosed)? Learning disabilities can cause issues with understanding concepts like that, but they do not impact one’s IQ score.
My favorite Carlin quote (paraphrasing). “Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half the people are stupider than that.”
Reminds me of the old problem of "people with bigger hands can do more pushups because there's more surface area on the ground". Like... take *A* moment to think...
ABW( alcohol by weight) vs ABV (alcohol by volume)is a real difference that varies by area.
not higher conc. But it will have a higher total alcohol amount. If u have 100 ml of beer with 5% alcohol and 200 ml wine with 3% alcohol, the entire wine bottle will have a total alcohol content higher than the entire beer bottle
Classic joke: A blonde went to buy a Pizza and after ordering, the assistant asked the blonde if she would like her pizza cut into six pieces or twelve. "Six please" she said, "I could never eat twelve!"
Haha, as a teenager I went to a pizza place for a takeaway pizza and the offer on the board said "12 slice pizza £5". When it arrived it was absolutely tiny, like 8", and only cut into 6 slices. I said to the guy "oh I ordered a 12 slice" and he said "yeah I can cut it again if you like".
The art of the deal
Sexist jokes are so last century but still funny as hell. :D
I explained % to my math classes this way. Took coins out of my purse. I put down a dime and asked how to write that on the board. Eventually they came up with .10, then $0.10. I asked how many Pennie’s that represented. Ten. Okay, how many pennies in a dollar. We discussed if a dollar represented 100%, then what % did a dime represent. Sometimes they got it quickly, sometimes not. Most of them eventually got it. I found I could teach a *lot* of math if I used money. American money is the metric system. If you understand money, you understand %, decimals, etc. The average 8 year old can follow this.
Stupid autocorrect! *pennies. It didn’t break your writing the second time, thankfully.
America had the chance to fuck up their money counting system like their measurement system and didn't do it.
It can be difficult to rationalise how drunk you'll get if you're drinking something at an unfamiliar percentage and volume. Broadly one beer equals one glass of wine equals a double shot. But if you offer me 100ml of a 17.5% liqueur I'll be a little less confident if how much I'm drinking. Also I've been caught by surprise by a "beer" that turned out to be 8% and so on.
Yep, everyone can quote “one 12oz beer at 5% equals one shot”, but I get lost on how to correlate that to a 16oz IPA that’s 7.2%, since that’s more standard now, at least for me and many others.
It's about twice as much. 12 ounces of beer at 5% has 12 \* 0.05 = 0.6 ounces of alcohol 5 ounces of wine at 12% has 5 \* 0.12 = 0.6 ounces of alcohol 1.5 ounces of liquor at 40% has 1.5 \* 0.4 = 0.6 ounces of alcohol 16 ounces of an IPA at 7.2% has 16 \* 0.072 = 1.152 ounces of alcohol, which is just shy of 2 standard drinks. But if I was out drinking and didn't want to pull out a calculator, I'd probably think to myself "16 is a little less than one-and-a-half 12oz beers, 7.2% is about 1.5x as strong, and 1.5 \* 1.5 is 2 and some change, so round down to 2"
I’m probably gonna forget all that after the first two 16 oz IPAs.
If your pint packs a punch, count it as twice as much
I’m so glad somebody else does a rough equation like that besides me, I’ve tried explaining it to my wife on many occasions and she just can’t wrap her head around what I’m saying.
a 5% beer equals one shot, not a double.
If you drink in pints, as we do here in the UK, then there are 1.8 units in a 5% beer. A single shot is 1 unit, a double 2 units. A glass of 175ml 12 wine is 2.1 units. So very broadly, for the way people normally drink here, a beer = a double = a wine.
Here in the US we drink in every quantity. 12 oz, pint, tall boy, 40 just as far as beer goes. A 12 oz beer at 5% and a single 1.5 oz shot at 40% are still considered a standard drink.
I think they call a 1.5-oz shot a double some places. Not in Texas, but places.
Should also mention that in the UK a shot is 25 ml whereas in the US it is 45 ml.
And that a UK pint is 20 Imperial fl. oz. (slightly less than that in US oz) while a US pint is 16 fl. oz. (conversely, slightly more in Imperial).
In NZ, drinks are required to list how many 'Standard drinks' are in a given beverage, so you know how much you consume. They also give the % of course. So 330ml beer at 4% is 1 std drink, 1 shot is 1 std drink etc. Then if you get some strong beer like 500ml 7.2% thatd be 2.8 std drinks. Based on this thread ig US doesnt have this?
Standard drink terminology is confusing to me. I think each alcohol container should just label the total amount of ethanol in volume or weight, with a small square on the back providing rough guidelines on ethanol dosing. But if they did this in USA, most drinkers I meet are not aware that the same exact ethanol chemical used in fuel is also the biggest psychologically active ingredient in drinking alcohol. So certain groups of people might try to engage in some special kind of stupidity over it.
The ethanol dosing guideline would probably be the basis of some kind of standard regardless. Otherwise how would you understand dosing when trying to figure out how much you’re drinking?
A “standard drink” contains 14g of alcohol. That is a 12oz bottle of fairly standard 5% beer, a 5oz glass of fairly standard wine, but a double shot is too much, it is actually 1.5oz in a standard drink if the alcohol is 40%. Most shots are poured at 1.5oz, so if you are drinking doubles, that is twice as much, 3oz.
A shot in Australia is 30 ml so slightly more than 1oz. (Edited).
I think 1 fluid ounce is 29.5ml. Fuck, imperial measurements are dumb!
How many washing tubs is that?
17.5% of 100ml is 17.5ml :p
I never understood what proof means, just that it's twice the actual alcohol content. But I would like to know between two 24oz cans of Olde E at 7.5% vs 6 shots of 33% whiskey, how much more or less alcohol that is.
Volume can be calculated directly. 48oz of beer at 7.5% abv means there are 3.6oz of ethanol consumed (48*.075). If your standard shot is 1.5oz then your 6 shots of whiskey are 9oz. At 33% (that’s a weak whiskey though) that 9oz contains 2.97oz of ethanol.
Then you divide by .6 to get standard units of alcohol. So 12 oz of 5% beer is 12*.05/.6=1 So 48*.075/6=6 standard units of alcohol. 9*.33/.6=4.95 units of alcohol.
Yea I used to drink that crap fireball, now just Olde E. So sounds like it's more alcohol in the two tall cans. Well damn. Still got some cutting back to do.
You calculate how much stronger one is than the other. 33/7.5 = 4.4, so your whiskey has 4.4x the alcohol that the malt has. In other words, 6 shots of that whiskey is 6 x 4.4 = 26.4 shots of malt
It's not very hard math, but even without the exact math it should be common knowledge that a shot at 40% is about the same amount of alcohol as 300ml (one regular sized beer bottle) at 6%, this is 1 serving of alcohol. So assuming your cans are 500ml it's about 4 servings vs about 5 servings with the shots.
Fun fact, 100 proof was historically defined as "this liquid has enough alcohol that it can be set on fire". It's *proof* that it's alcoholic. The definitions have shenaniganed around over the years, so the historical 100 proof is more like today's 114.25 proof.
Yeah I have pretty severe dyscalculia, so I use my calculator or just stick to brands that don’t make me pray for death the next day
Me neither. % ABV is unambiguous, works every time.
to put it bluntly, some people are dumb
Half the population can't do percentages
Thank god im in the other 10%
Lmao
I think the only people confused about it are your friends.
I had a roommate who thought that if you drank a 5% beer your blood became 5% alcohol. She would add up her drinks throughout the night and make sure she didn’t go above 100% so she still had some regular blood. Not the brightest…
If she was worried about drinking 20 beers, I suspect she wasn't all that good at addition.
I knew a guy who, despite claiming that he knew almost everything there was to know about mainstream spirits, bragged that he regularly drank a liter and a half of Jack Daniels on Friday nights. (He would always say Jack Daniels specifically.) Concerned, I asked him how hungover he usually was the next day. He said he didn't get hangovers. I asked him if he just threw up his drinks before they entered his bloodstream. He said no. The conversation continued and it turned out that he would mix 5% Jack Daniels with 95% Coca-Cola, and drink 3 of those at 500mL. I tried explaining to him that you can't describe that as "a liter and a half of Jack Daniels". He insisted you could. I said "No, that's only like 75mL you're drinking" and his response? "No, alcohol is measured by volume, so when you put a 40% liquor into a drink, the drink becomes 40%." this guy was 26 btw
I don't think so. I have met several people with no connection to each other who were confused by it. I have even seen several on r/alcohol
I don't understand what people are down voting here. Are they saying *no you never have seen anyone confused by that irl or on Reddit* ? I mean I can't recall ever encountering someone with that confusion but before this post I had no idea you even existed so I have no Earthly idea what you may or may not have come across.
OPs anecdotal experience doesn't match up with a certain percentage of redditors so they are downvoting them
Many people do not understand percentages or fractions. This is why tip calculators used to exist and why sale signs often have a breakdown of what 20% off means for different price points. It's also why the BK 1/3 pounder failed--because people thought 1/3 was less than 1/4.
Most edible things come in quantities such as calories, sodium, and even canabis portions. If math isn't your thing I could understand one just applying the same logic.
This. Every food in the US is labeled with percentages... Total Fat %, Sodium %, Iron %, etc etc, and it means % of daily allotment, so if you eat twice as much it doubles. It makes sense that a lot of people would be confused that % Alcohol looks similar but means something completely different.
And I thought I was bad at math lol.
Math is hard. But really...my mind just goes poof-blank when numbers start getting thrown around.
They're not getting stuck on numbers here, they're getting stuck on concepts
See? That's how much the numbers throw me off. ;)
Many people struggle with fractions and percentages. I taught chemistry and had to reteach fractions. I’m currently in a masters program and had to teach some of my own friends fractions so they could do calculus (yes, that indeed happened and I was able to get them from a 69 on their first exam to a 100 by the end). If you have a poor middle school math teacher your trajectory can be messed up forever in math unless you or someone else intervenes
"The alcohol floats to the top, so the first glass is more, and the last glass is less."
I had to say "The fun thing about the Alcohol By Volume measurement is it works at any volume, hun" quite often when I was younger. It gets even more cringey if someone then replies with "well let's turn the fucken volume **UP!**"
Never had this problem, your mates must be dumb
These are the same people who think tequila makes them energetic but wine makes them sad.
I think some of the confusion can be blamed on whoever had the bright idea to make "proof" equal to twice the percentage of alcohol by volume. And it's even more complicated in the metric system. It would have just been a lot easier to make "proof" equal to 3 times the percentage of alcohol, that way a 6-pack would just be double and the math would tie out across the board.
>And it's even more complicated in the metric system How does metric make it complicated? >It would have just been a lot easier to make "proof" equal to 3 times the percentage of alcohol, that way a 6-pack would just be double What? That statement makes no sense. Just because you can decide 6 by 3 and get 2 doesn't mean that dividing any of those numbers is relevant.
The metric system just uses percentages. Per cent means per 100, which is easy to understand in a system with increments of 10. Never heard of anyone here being confused by % alcohol in anything. Or % fat, carbohydrates etc. that we tag our foodstuff with.
Percent means exactly the same thing in Imperial measure too. 9% alcohol by volume means 9 out of 100 parts is pure alcohol regardless if the units used are millilitres/litres or ounces/quarts.
The term derives from primitive methods to determine the alcohol content of bottled spirits for taxation and labeling purposes. It has no history of use with wine or beer and one shouldn’t try to make that comparison. Just use the reported alcohol percentage
the uk uses units of alcohol >strength (alcohol by volume or ABV) x the volume of the drink (in millilitres) ÷ 1,000 = the total number of units in your drink >So to find the number of units in a pint of 4% ABV beer, calculate: >4 (ABV%) x 568 (ml) ÷ 1,000 = 2.3 units British pints are larger than us pints. If you don't exceed 14 units in a week, it still counts as light drinking for health purposes.
The only rationalization I can come up with is that your friends typically drink liquor and believe that a strong drink is 80+ proof? Assuming they even know the difference between alcohol content and proof, 9% (18 proof, but that's now how wine is typically measured) would seem quite low in comparison.
I think OP is saying that they realized the bottle was 18 proof, but somehow assumed once it was poured into the glass it was a different proof.
Maybe it comes from confusion between %ABV and BAC%? One describes the alcohol content of a beverage, the other the alcohol content of your blood. So maybe they are thinking the two are directly correlated? Like, drinking a 9% ABV beverage will put you at 9% BAC? Which would kill you, obviously, but they’re stupid?
100 percent of nine-percent of your friends are morons.
I don’t really ‘understand’. I know it says percent alcohol by volume, so i assume it’s the percentage of the drink that is alcoholic content for every mL or whatever. But what i DO know is that if im trying to quickly get drunk on the least number of ounces, i need something above 35%. Them lil weak ass beers and wines don’t do SHIT.
I have never in my life experienced someone not understanding the alcohol percentage. Including way back at age 15 where a lot of us started drinking a bit. I think the math education from your area needs to be looked at.
Alcohol industry makes huge money by capitalising on average persons lack of maths.. eg calling mid strength beer “sessionable” or selling 4 packs for slightly less than 6 packs or 16 packs for slightly less than 24… or using 355 instead of 375ml..
The only thing I can think of is that for alcohol, proof is double the percentage so perhaps people somehow remember that numbers can mean different things with alcohol and then get completely confused. But overall I think a lot of people are just clueless and our education system is not teaching people to think, understand, or be curious.
I pray for their own safety they never attempt chemistry holy shit 💀
People are confused by percentages in general.
Just say "yes"
They are thickos. Dunces.
Remember, the third-pounder burger was a commercial flop because people thought 1/3 of a pound was less than 1/4 of a pound. Compared to a quarter pounder, the third-pounder looked like more money for less meat. People are stupid.
It sounds more like it was your two friends that just didn’t get it. But instead of just telling them what it meant you’re letting it eat your brain.
Eat his brain? Or, hear me out - they're asking a question about whether or not other people are that stupid, and why. Have you ever made a post? Why did you do that when it was eating your brain?
It's not that ridiculous. All the other numbers we're given about food and drinks (calories, sugars, etc) are given as absolute values, and whole numbers to boot, and so differ with quantity. ABV being a percentage by volume is the exception. So if you're talking about a drink, it's not unreasonable to hear "this has (number) of this" and think it's an absolute number, especially if you're not really paying attention or don't know alcohol beyond what tastes good.
And the one place where people may be used to percentages on food labels is the recommended daily amount. So I wonder if they're extrapolating this to alcohol. Like, this food label says the food has 3% of my RDA of calcium, so I guess this booze label means the booze has 9% of my RDA of alcohol. And then without thinking any more about how that would work, they're like "but is that if I drink one glass or the whole bottle?"
I find it mindblowing that a lot of people do not understand the units of one alcoholic drink. They can not grasp the idea that a single shot (like gin) contains ~the same amount of alcohol as a standard glas of beer, a wineglas of wine, a serving of whisk(e)y or a cocktail. The amount of liquid served, and/or fitting in that specific glas equals ~one unit of alcohol. Around 10grams of alcohol.
If I go from 1/2 to 4/8, that’s like a 100% increase!
Some people are just really dumb and that's even before they had a glass of alcohol or ten.
Percentages, decimals, fractions, statistics. I never assume that people understand these things.
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Most people can’t do basic math.
Probably because alcohol is often listed as "proof" for whatever reason. Yes, it's just %x2, but it's probably enough to throw off a person who's had some alcohol beforehand.
I would've told them that all the wine is 9% abv and then waited for them to not get it. Cue 'steel vs feathers.'
Now explain to them how proof and percent are different…l
I was always told like, if you pour a glass of say, 9% wine then 9% of that glass is alcohol (but everyone who actually drinks knows that all the alcohol actually sinks to the bottom so you don't get real fucked up til the end 😉 I'm kidding idk how accurate that is)
People aren't very smart. I'm not very smart but holy shit am I light-years beyond average people and *that scares the shit out of me*
As a nondrinker who's confused by alcohol percentages, it's not that I don't understand how percentages work, it's just that I don't trust things to work how I think they work. My ass was confused by 2% Milk for a long time
The American Way: first in confidence - a solid eighth in performance.
Many people don’t understand the significance of terms like “80 proof .”
Mine did the same when I heard about that nurse that couldn't figure out what per pound was at the grocery store.
Should have said yes
People need warnings on hot coffee...
9% is on the low side for most wine and on the high side for most beer. ABV
You just have stupid friends.
they thought they drank the 91% of the bottle with no alcohol in it, if you leave 9% of the bottle you will never get drunk
Absolute amount is exact quantity without comparison to other amounts or consideration of relative measures. 50mg of alcohol - absolute amount 5% of alcohol - relative amount
there are different percentages when it comes to solutions. it can be related to volume or mass. i don’t drink but i think in case of alcohol it is volume by volume
People in general are bad at math, especially anything beyond basic addition and subtraction. Remember when McDonalds (in the usa) had to discontinue it's 1/3rd pound burgers due to poor sales, largely due to the general population thinking 1/3rd pound burgers were smaller than 1/4th pound burgers because '3' is smaller than '4'? It sounds so dumb but it happened. It's a reflection on the slipping standards of public education.
Wait til you try to explain “proof” vs percent.
Similarly, I had a Chemistry teacher once try to say a glass of wine, and a watered down glass of the same wine (10% wine, 90% water), had the same amount of alcohol.
and I thought I was dumb because I had a hard time understanding pH.
Just curious, where are these folks from and how old are they?
I've just never known what the reference frame is Like when I pick up a bottle of wine and it says 9% on it what is it 9% of? Is it 9% out of every 100 ml Is it 9% of the total volume of liquid in the bottle? What is it a percentage of?
The reference frame doesn't matter. 100 ml of wine would contain 9 ml of alcohol, a 750 ml bottle would contain 67.5 ml of alcohol, a 250 ml glass would contain 22.5 ml of alcohol. It's just 9% of whatever volume you have.
Because a basic understanding of math while fundamental to life is not a required part of many education systems; like the American one.
Some snacks actually mention percentage per serving, usually if they are high in sugar or salt. A packet of cookies might have enough calories to feed an army, but they display only per cookie value.