How to explain to Americans: If You remove 3 bullets out of an Gen 4 Glock 26 9mm 12-Round magazine, that's 1/4. If you remove 4 bullets, that's 1/3. The police can shoot one more unarmed black man with 1/3 of the magazine than 1/4.
"Somehow it's ok for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt." - Neil deGrasse Tyson
It's been this way for a long time now unfortunately.
The American education system (for my old millennial ass)
"Memorize this. No I will not explain how it works or why. Memorize it take the test and leave me alone."
Me who is physically incapable of memorizing seemingly arbitrary stuff and needs to understand for it to stick: I guess fuck me then huh? 1/4 pounder it is!
The way he lays out his math had me a little confused at first but I blame it on my lack of coffee
When I was in grade school I remember a teacher told me that if you think about the greater and less than signs as alligators eating the bigger numbers... To this day, it's still what I see
I used to work on a deli. Someone ordered an eighth pound of meat (which is like nothing and nobody ever did this). My coworker asked me if that meant .8 on the scale.
Well, the 1/3 also had to compete with the double-quarter (aka, half pound, but two patties), which is bigger and feels significantly more substantial as well.
It doesn't help that any place I saw selling them (let's be real here, this is about McD's) was offering an expensive and fancy 1/3rd burger (deluxe bacon, southwest ranch style, Asian sensation with real gold flake, etc) against the old reliable (cheap) quarter-pounder. Perceived value is everything.
It doesn't take a ton of mental capacity, but even though I have a good education in math, I still find myself doing the heuristics of assuming that larger digits means larger number. Using fractions for comparing sizes can flip these heuristics. And I think a lot of people are like me, and also that they won't spend a lot of time reading each item on the menu.
Where I'm from, burger sizes are just given in amount of grams, which makes it a lot easier to compare.
The third burger failed because it was a stupid amount when it came out, iirc it was more expensive than the quarter lber and like a dollar less than a double quarter lber.