> a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are
How did they manage this? I've tried every way I can think of forgetting my age, to no avail -the bastard number is always there :)
I'm in my twenties. Sometimes I forget my age. Only ever by one year -- I just don't remember if my birthday passed or not. Kind of like in January when write oit today's date and accidentally use the previous year. After a few mistakes, your brain adjusts and you start using the right one. Same thing for my age, except that I don't actually think about my age very often; it hasn't mattered much since I passed 21.
Re:How to Write in Plain English
by sethammons on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @09:54AM
(#24271362)
A colleague of a old friend would recall your birth year (and date?) to know your age. It is a value about you that doesn’t change and then you can derive the age.
I’ve started doing similar now. I don’t often recall my age or the number of years my wife and I have been married, or, heck, even our kid’s ages. But I recall all the years and dates. In this way, I more easily appear to recall the right value.
I'm in my late twenties and sometimes I need to pause, a bit like dealing with left/right or east/west.
Re:How to Write in Plain English
by alexchamberlain on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:50AM
(#24270391)
I may forget my age, but I can't forget I'm now over 30.
Re:How to Write in Plain English
by gvjddbnvdrbv on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @09:47AM
(#24271272)
I've no idea of my precise age.
Re:How to Write in Plain English
by inopinatus on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @09:55AM
(#24271366)
Of course. The Uncertainty Principle encodes this consequence: we know exactly how fast we are aging, ergo we cannot know exactly how old we are.
This problem is further exacerbated by the wide variety of temporal arithmetic possibilities any such workflow might adopt.
The solution is to either combine the forms, or (in an interactive context) ask the user if they were born before 1960, then give them the right form.