I tried playing this in 2009 at a math summer program. It scared a lot of people away, but I got a small group to join in. The scoring algorithm was rather questionable, but the game of competitive Fermi estimates was fun.
I can’t claim to have improved much at rationality or estimates, but, ever since then, I remember that, to the question “How many liters of water are there in the ocean,” the answer “1 mole of liters” is not the mark of a deceiver, but is actually relatively close, being only 1 order of magnitude too low.
If I ever play again, now that I know some measure theory, I’d be tempted to play a distribution that has an arbitrarily high mass at every rational number, and 0 at every irrational number.
I tried playing this in 2009 at a math summer program. It scared a lot of people away, but I got a small group to join in. The scoring algorithm was rather questionable, but the game of competitive Fermi estimates was fun.
I can’t claim to have improved much at rationality or estimates, but, ever since then, I remember that, to the question “How many liters of water are there in the ocean,” the answer “1 mole of liters” is not the mark of a deceiver, but is actually relatively close, being only 1 order of magnitude too low.
If I ever play again, now that I know some measure theory, I’d be tempted to play a distribution that has an arbitrarily high mass at every rational number, and 0 at every irrational number.