this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Na you have large population centers where a lot of alarm clocks go off at exactly 7am. The same people fall asleep over a longer interval of time the night before.
that is a good point I didn't think about alarm clocks
I suppose every half hour there would be a surge of people waking up lol
Plus anyone who does in their sleep.
Of course there are moments where more people awake at the same time than fall asleep at the same time. In the second 07:00:00 , yeah, more people awake than fall asleep. The same isn't true for 22:13:35. And if you look at all seconds of the day you will find that on average, each second the amount of people that fall asleep is roughly equal to the amount of people waking up.
What you are talking about is variance. There is a higher variance in the times of people falling asleep than there is in the times of people waking up. That does not mean that "more people wake up at the same time than fall asleep". There are times of the day when significantly more people wake up than fall asleep, but as a counterweight, on prettey much all other times, the amount of people falling asleep is slightly higher than the amount of people waking up.
So actually, it's the reverse. Given that most people wake up to alarm clocks, if you pick a random time of the day, it is likely that in that second more people fall asleep than wake up
However, that’s not what the title is saying. The title says that more waking times are lumped at the same second in the morning.
This, and also just that it's not that deep. It's ShowerThoughts, not ShowerEpiphanies.
The title says "There's more people who wake up at the same second than people who fall asleep at the same second". One could (and most people seem to) interpret this as "the maximum amount of people waking up at any given second is higher than the maximum amount of people falling asleep at any given second", which is a statement I agree with. I interpreted it as "The amount of people waking up at any given time is higher than the amount of people falling asleep at the same time", which is of course false.
It seems we just weren't talking about the same thing. You were talking about the maximum values of both distributions, for which the statement is true, while I only considered the distributions' median and mean values, for which the statement isn't true.
I disagree that the post makes clear OP is referring to the max values, but I guess that's because english is not my first language, and my statistics background likely made me over analyze the statement.