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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where this is going, but so far it's cute.

There's one major gripe i have though, the UI doesn't let me accurately express my beliefs.

On the question "How many dollars does the average American spend at vending machines during a year?" i thought it might be somewhere around 100, between 10 and 1000. However i could only get it as far as 38 - 162, which didn't allow me to cover the right answer. Optimally though i'd like to be able to answer "i haven't got a friggin' clue".

On the other hand, i guess it demonstrates a massive cognitive bias on the side of the makers of this: Not everyone is confident in knowing the answer to something.

Difficulties on other questions:

  - cat sleep hours in a day: allowed me to set ranges like 0-48
  - degradation time of a plastic bag: did not allow me to set 200-5000

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Yeah, this is a fair criticism. There are explicit bounds encoded in each problem and when those conflict with your estimates, you will be frustrated.

Haven't got a frigging clue isn't a fair thing to say though. The whole point of the exercise is that most people have a significant misalignment going on between their modelling of reality and the track record of their modelling ability.

Exercises like figuring out how much milk a cow produces in a week or how fast a horse runs require you to consider what information you DO have suggests about upper and lower bounds and things like that, and then correctly realizing the confidence of your models is the other half of the equation.

You are pretty sure, I would imagine, that a cow doesn't produce 10,000 gallons of milk in a week. You are pretty sure that a 'heavy' user of a vending machine might use three a day and buy a bunch of snacks and a drink or two, and that 'heavy' users maximally represent Y% of the population, with high confidence.

You can use these intuitions to guide your estimates, and you do in fact do so on a regular basis. The exercise is calibrating those estimates against their empirical accuracy.

The point here is: The website asked me about my beliefs. It did NOT ask me to work out the correct solution. And if i believe i cannot possibly give a useful estimate then that should be a viable answer i can give.

Your example is especially relevant since i don't even know what a gallon is. I guess it's maybe a liter or something? Who knows. Either way: Without actual research there is no more accurate modelling of my belief than "i don't know", period.

Similarly, some of the answers were unnecessarily vague. For instance, I actually happened to read just yesterday a blurb about racing horse speed, and I knew that while racehorses can reach around 30mph, the very fastest horses can apparently reach sprinting speeds (briefly) of around 50mph. So which answer does it want? (This was especially frustrating since for most of the other answers I had no friggin' clue...)

Yeah, many of the questions I would have just said "Not sure" if I was asked and then I would google the answer.

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