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while incredibly annoying at the time, my high school chemistry teacher gave me a great epistemic boon by drilling the importance of sigfigs into my head; many numbers are thrown around w/o any regard for their precision. sigfigs provide an invaluable framework for fixing this.
"the population of south korea is 51,326,242"
bitch the fuck? wtf did you just say to me? how sure are you about that. did you check? did you quantify all the sources of methodological error in ur calculation and account for them entirely? no the fuck you didnt. just say 51k jfc