I got 8 / 10, and was very close on one of the incorrect guesses (33,000 − 133,000km for the coastline, reported as >135,600km). On the other hand, I used much more than the allotted 10 minutes, and did a Fermi calculation for each value. I’m not sure why that should be disallowed.
Because you could have more quickly raised your estimate by a large amount to make sure you got it “right”.
Why spend a long time getting 133,000Km when you could have put 133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Km?
Because, the author claims, you think “narrow range is better, looks smarter” even though that’s not what was asked for. You spent a long time making it ‘more accurate’ and consequently got it wronger wrt. to what the question was asking for.
I realize that an easy way to cheat is to answer (0 (appropriate unit), 3^^^3 (appropriate unit))for questions 1-9, and answer (pi^e, pi^e) for question 10. That seems to be the “wrong” way to go about this task.
I wanted to deliver, to the best of my current knowledge (without looking anything up), 5% and 95% bounds for the true value, for each item. Where my knowledge was more limited, that meant a wider bound, but that shouldn’t mean less effort to establish that bound, should it? That seems to be what you’re implying.
Obviously, we need to learn that narrower ranges are not better, but if we want 90% ranges, we should work to ensure that the ranges are as close to 90% as our knowledge allows, not 99% just because we’re reversing one kind of stupidity in order to achieve another.
I got 8 / 10, and was very close on one of the incorrect guesses (33,000 − 133,000km for the coastline, reported as >135,600km). On the other hand, I used much more than the allotted 10 minutes, and did a Fermi calculation for each value. I’m not sure why that should be disallowed.
Because you could have more quickly raised your estimate by a large amount to make sure you got it “right”.
Why spend a long time getting 133,000Km when you could have put 133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Km?
Because, the author claims, you think “narrow range is better, looks smarter” even though that’s not what was asked for. You spent a long time making it ‘more accurate’ and consequently got it wronger wrt. to what the question was asking for.
I realize that an easy way to cheat is to answer (0 (appropriate unit), 3^^^3 (appropriate unit))for questions 1-9, and answer (pi^e, pi^e) for question 10. That seems to be the “wrong” way to go about this task.
I wanted to deliver, to the best of my current knowledge (without looking anything up), 5% and 95% bounds for the true value, for each item. Where my knowledge was more limited, that meant a wider bound, but that shouldn’t mean less effort to establish that bound, should it? That seems to be what you’re implying.
Obviously, we need to learn that narrower ranges are not better, but if we want 90% ranges, we should work to ensure that the ranges are as close to 90% as our knowledge allows, not 99% just because we’re reversing one kind of stupidity in order to achieve another.