I… haven’t actually used this technique verbatim through to completion. I’ve made a few attempts to practice and learn it on my own, but usually struggled a bit to reach conclusions that felt right.
I have some sense that this skill is important, and it’d be worthwhile for me to go to a workshop similar to the one where Habryka and Eli first put this together. This feels like it should be an important post, and I’m not sure if my struggle to realize it’s value personally is more due to “it’s not as valuable as I thought” or “you actually have to do a fair bit of homework for it to start paying off.”
When I’ve tried applying this post, it’s usually been in a situation where I have something that feels tricky/fuzzy to evaluate. I’ve seen habryka use fermi modeling in domains like “how many people will get covid?”, but usually when I find myself reaching for this post it’s when I have a question more like “how many dollars should I/donors be willing to pay for the LessWrong Review, as an institution, vs other projects the LessWrong team could do?”
I’ve never sat and practiced generating 50 fermi calculations in a domain where the answer was easy to verify.
Eli mentions “he’d write this post pretty differently today” in the OP. I’m not sure the problem here is lack-of-rewrite, vs “building a webapp that presents you with a bunch of fermi-modeling problems you can quickly train against.”
The most conceptually interesting part here is the “generate multiple reference frames, and multiple models per reference frame, and start with something not the best model so you don’t get immediately attached.” That seems like something that should clearly be cognitively useful, but I haven’t made it work for me.
I… haven’t actually used this technique verbatim through to completion. I’ve made a few attempts to practice and learn it on my own, but usually struggled a bit to reach conclusions that felt right.
I have some sense that this skill is important, and it’d be worthwhile for me to go to a workshop similar to the one where Habryka and Eli first put this together. This feels like it should be an important post, and I’m not sure if my struggle to realize it’s value personally is more due to “it’s not as valuable as I thought” or “you actually have to do a fair bit of homework for it to start paying off.”
When I’ve tried applying this post, it’s usually been in a situation where I have something that feels tricky/fuzzy to evaluate. I’ve seen habryka use fermi modeling in domains like “how many people will get covid?”, but usually when I find myself reaching for this post it’s when I have a question more like “how many dollars should I/donors be willing to pay for the LessWrong Review, as an institution, vs other projects the LessWrong team could do?”
I’ve never sat and practiced generating 50 fermi calculations in a domain where the answer was easy to verify.
Eli mentions “he’d write this post pretty differently today” in the OP. I’m not sure the problem here is lack-of-rewrite, vs “building a webapp that presents you with a bunch of fermi-modeling problems you can quickly train against.”
The most conceptually interesting part here is the “generate multiple reference frames, and multiple models per reference frame, and start with something not the best model so you don’t get immediately attached.” That seems like something that should clearly be cognitively useful, but I haven’t made it work for me.