I have a personal addendum to shopping cart theory.
If you can return your cart, then you're worthy to live in civilized society. It's your mess, and it was easy to do, and it makes life easier for everyone.
If you return an additional cart someone else left there as well as your own cart, you're the sort of person who could build a civilization.
Seems shallow at first, but I will say that when I see an abandoned cart now, I'll take the time to return it.
If you can return your cart, then you're worthy to live in civilized society. It's your mess, and it was easy to do, and it makes life easier for everyone.
If you return an additional cart someone else left there as well as your own cart, you're the sort of person who could build a civilization.
Seems shallow at first, but I will say that when I see an abandoned cart now, I'll take the time to return it.
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@sj_zero Interesting, I’ve done this quite a few times throughout my life. Guess I need to stay alive and help
@Tony @sj_zero Shopping cart theory is already dramatic. You can look at it the other way and claim you're taking someone's job by putting them back. I just do it because I don't want to have a cart hit my truck and I think most people understand the universal need for that. Some are just garbage though.
When you pick something to set up as a measurement, you have to do 2 things: You set a zero point where the measurement isn't really picking up anything, and a span where you're reading a whole value.
This mathematically relates to a subtraction where you take the base signal and reduce it to 0, and then a multiplication where you take the base signal at 100% and expand it into a meaningful signal.
In many cases you're taking a tiny signal and turning it into a huge output (pH probes for example output in the millivolt range), and so get a lot of junk signals too. You also have to filter out gaussian noise introduced by the fact the universe isn't straightforward -- perhaps a great man is in a bad mood and doesn't return his cart one day (or worse has multiple carts and returns none of them), and perhaps a terrible person on a lark decides to return 10 carts one day, but given 1000 more instances neither would occur, the universe isn't nice to us when we're trying to measure stuff precisely.
Moreover, by measuring something you control for it, and once you control for it, it isn't as good a measurement as it used to be because you're changing it intentionally. In my example I return carts, but is it because I'm a great man who will create the next civilization? No, it's because I'm a normal person who made up a heuristic in his mind and decided to do the thing that makes me look good by that heuristic.
Ultimately, it's just a piece of pop psychology and should be treated as such, similar to horoscopes or reading tea leaves or animal bones, rather than anything like a hard science.
This mathematically relates to a subtraction where you take the base signal and reduce it to 0, and then a multiplication where you take the base signal at 100% and expand it into a meaningful signal.
In many cases you're taking a tiny signal and turning it into a huge output (pH probes for example output in the millivolt range), and so get a lot of junk signals too. You also have to filter out gaussian noise introduced by the fact the universe isn't straightforward -- perhaps a great man is in a bad mood and doesn't return his cart one day (or worse has multiple carts and returns none of them), and perhaps a terrible person on a lark decides to return 10 carts one day, but given 1000 more instances neither would occur, the universe isn't nice to us when we're trying to measure stuff precisely.
Moreover, by measuring something you control for it, and once you control for it, it isn't as good a measurement as it used to be because you're changing it intentionally. In my example I return carts, but is it because I'm a great man who will create the next civilization? No, it's because I'm a normal person who made up a heuristic in his mind and decided to do the thing that makes me look good by that heuristic.
Ultimately, it's just a piece of pop psychology and should be treated as such, similar to horoscopes or reading tea leaves or animal bones, rather than anything like a hard science.