I wasn’t actively trying to find out who was Red. Julian said some weird things like 80% maize calories, but everybody said some weird things every now and then.
He hadn’t a good reason and stuck to the 80% anyway in a suspiciously out of character way… it’s hard to describe. He can take it as a compliment that I expected high standards :-)
I expected everybody to have massive misconceptions about things, so while I believed his 80% maize calories estimate to be completely wrong, he seemed to me like someone who simply doesn’t know much about food. For example notice how completely wrong we were about maize yield per square km, surprisingly all in the same direction—that’s the kind of mistake that amateurs make often .
Also now that I think of it—our estimate was for weight of corn with cobs. If by any chance one cited by Wikipedia is for corn without cobs, then our first estimate might have been insanely accurate. I don’t really have energy to investigate this, but if someone else wants, go ahead.
I wasn’t actively trying to find out who was Red. Julian said some weird things like 80% maize calories, but everybody said some weird things every now and then.
He hadn’t a good reason and stuck to the 80% anyway in a suspiciously out of character way… it’s hard to describe. He can take it as a compliment that I expected high standards :-)
I expected everybody to have massive misconceptions about things, so while I believed his 80% maize calories estimate to be completely wrong, he seemed to me like someone who simply doesn’t know much about food. For example notice how completely wrong we were about maize yield per square km, surprisingly all in the same direction—that’s the kind of mistake that amateurs make often .
Also now that I think of it—our estimate was for weight of corn with cobs. If by any chance one cited by Wikipedia is for corn without cobs, then our first estimate might have been insanely accurate. I don’t really have energy to investigate this, but if someone else wants, go ahead.
What can I say—it was just a gut feeling! :-) As I said on Saturday, I already knew Julian.
I don’t think it was too overconfident for that gut feeling to count as the lesser of two pieces of evidence raising p(RedJulian) from .5 to .85.