Sorry if this is a bit vague, but I am having a discussion with my coworkers that is vaguely familiar, but I cannot recall the name of this class of math problems, so I don't know where to start researching further.
Basically, the problem goes like this:
- Doing X instead of Y saves me 5 minutes.
- I have identified 1,000 other places where we do X.
- My college says that doing Y in all of these places saves 5,000 minutes. Simple multiplication. I disagree.
- I'm pretty sure that we don't spend even close to 5,000 minutes total doing all 1,000 instances of X.
- Therefore, there must be some other more complex equation that can help estimate the time actually saved by doing Y for N occurrences.
This is vaguely reminiscent of the argument about buying quantities of a product at a grocery store. Say I need 1 apple. I drive to the store, park my car, go into the store, find the apple, put it in my cart, go to the checkout stand, pay for the apple, drive home and enjoy my apple. Say that takes 30 minutes. Now say I need 10 apples. It's not 300 minutes, it's still 10 minutes. But say I needed 10,000 apples - well that would take longer. At some point there are other factors to consider.
My direct question is: what class or category of mathematics or statistics concepts should I be relearning to better estimate problems of this nature?
Bonus if you can give me some equations to get started. Thanks.
P.S. I'm probably way off on what tags I've selected. Please feel free to edit.