I would recommend against “X is the 13th largest Y”, because other than people who’ve memorized the Top Twenty Ys getting this right is purely a matter of guesswork. “One of the 10 largest” is better; so is “X is bigger than Y”.
Well, if one can come up with the top Ys, one can reason about what probability one wants to assign to that statement. For example, if I can think of 9 countries that I think are bigger than Algeria, and three of which I am uncertain, I can well assign a probability of, say, 30%. Calibration training could be done this way.
Yeah, I guess, but that’s a whole lot of work for one short question of this kind and if you can think of 12 candidates then there’s a good chance you’ve forgotten a couple. I don’t mean to imply that this kind of question is completely useless, only that other sorts are probably better.
I would recommend against “X is the 13th largest Y”, because other than people who’ve memorized the Top Twenty Ys getting this right is purely a matter of guesswork. “One of the 10 largest” is better; so is “X is bigger than Y”.
Well, if one can come up with the top Ys, one can reason about what probability one wants to assign to that statement. For example, if I can think of 9 countries that I think are bigger than Algeria, and three of which I am uncertain, I can well assign a probability of, say, 30%. Calibration training could be done this way.
Yeah, I guess, but that’s a whole lot of work for one short question of this kind and if you can think of 12 candidates then there’s a good chance you’ve forgotten a couple. I don’t mean to imply that this kind of question is completely useless, only that other sorts are probably better.
I’d say it depends on what exactly you want to do once you have the statements.