MADRID (AP) — Spain has ordered Airbnb to block more than 65,000 holiday listings on its platform for having violated rules, the Consumer Rights Ministry said Monday.
The ministry said that many of the 65,935 Airbnb listings it had ordered to be withdrawn did not include their license number or specify whether the owner was an individual or a company. Others listed numbers that didn’t match what authorities had.
Spain is grappling with a housing affordability crisis that has spurred government action against short-term rental companies.
What does this mean
It means humans seek out patterns and similarities even when there are none going so far as to perceive was isn’t even there.
In this instance it’s simply that the number in this article/legal action is close by a few hundred to a number that is a common number found in computing due to how electronic computation works.
It’s not necessarily just a coincidence (but probably is).
Maybe they’re using a spreadsheet that counts row numbers in an unsigned int, so the maximum number of rows is 65,535.
Someone accidentally counted the number of rows instead of the number of non-empty rows, then added 400 because they think about 400 properties were omitted from their data for whatever reason. That’s 65935.
Maybe it is pareidolia, but it’s notable enough that you’d check your numbers again before passing it on.
I’m not a data scientist but in a semi related field. Sometimes numbers just trigger a feeling that you need to review your work / or “sanity check”.
I see mistakes several times a year caused by similar mishandling.
I’m not a “master” but it’s the type of thing you associate with mastery that comes from decades of experience (or debilitating anxiety).
Absolutely. Any time I see 65NNN, it triggers a sanity check.
Nice round numbers, like something taking exactly 10000 ms to return a result? Yeah I’ll bet thats not natural and theres a timeout set by a human doing that.
Pareidolia
https://www.xkcd.com/1551/