Meta-quiz Meme
Jul. 13th, 2008 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackRelated to several places, most recently stolen from God Plays Dice here, from a book. The point being not what people know, but how good they are at knowing what they know.
"For each of the following ten questions, give a range that you are 90 percent confident contains the correct answer. Your goal is to get exactly nine of these right[1]. Yes, I know that sounds weird! But the point is that if you get all ten right, you're proabably underestimating your own abilities to predict things. If you get eight or less, you're probably overestimating them."
Assign a range to each question in a comment. Look up the answers and see how many you got right. Post it if you like. GodPlaysDice said to repost it if you liked, and to email him the answers (izzycat AT gmail DOT com) if you like; I assume he wishes to informally gauge something.
Here are the questions:
1. How old was Martin Luther King, Jr. at death?
2. What is the length of the Nile River?
3. How many countries belong to OPEC?
4. How many books are there in the Old Testament?
5. What is the diameter of the moon?
6. What is the weight of an empty Boeing 747-400?
7. In what year was Mozart born?
8. What is the gestation period of an Asian elephant?
9. What is the air distance from London to Tokyo?
10. What is the depth of the deepest known point in the ocean?
Although what interested me was that it simply meant you could have a quiz where people who don't know much about it (or who know too much about it) can play too. I'm curious to see how big the ranges are -- mine are embarrassingly wide, generally between a factor of two to a factor of ten, though of course, I know several much more precisely now.
[1] It would be more precise to say "and not know which one you got wrong". The idea being you should be pretty certain about all of them, not guess "0-1000,000" on nine and "-315.17" on the last one :)
"For each of the following ten questions, give a range that you are 90 percent confident contains the correct answer. Your goal is to get exactly nine of these right[1]. Yes, I know that sounds weird! But the point is that if you get all ten right, you're proabably underestimating your own abilities to predict things. If you get eight or less, you're probably overestimating them."
Assign a range to each question in a comment. Look up the answers and see how many you got right. Post it if you like. GodPlaysDice said to repost it if you liked, and to email him the answers (izzycat AT gmail DOT com) if you like; I assume he wishes to informally gauge something.
Here are the questions:
1. How old was Martin Luther King, Jr. at death?
2. What is the length of the Nile River?
3. How many countries belong to OPEC?
4. How many books are there in the Old Testament?
5. What is the diameter of the moon?
6. What is the weight of an empty Boeing 747-400?
7. In what year was Mozart born?
8. What is the gestation period of an Asian elephant?
9. What is the air distance from London to Tokyo?
10. What is the depth of the deepest known point in the ocean?
Although what interested me was that it simply meant you could have a quiz where people who don't know much about it (or who know too much about it) can play too. I'm curious to see how big the ranges are -- mine are embarrassingly wide, generally between a factor of two to a factor of ten, though of course, I know several much more precisely now.
[1] It would be more precise to say "and not know which one you got wrong". The idea being you should be pretty certain about all of them, not guess "0-1000,000" on nine and "-315.17" on the last one :)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 03:04 pm (UTC)1. 33-45
2. 80-300 miles
3. 5-20
4. 38-40 (this is one I'm pretty confident of)
5. 500-1500 miles
6. Assuming by "empty" you mean empty of people, but full of equipment etc... even so, I feel I just don't even know what order of magnitude to guess here. To reach 90% certainty, I have to say something absurdly wide like 100 - 10000 tons :(
7. Owch. Painfully historically uneducated, I guess 1650-1800.
8. 8-16 months
9. 3000-8000 miles
10. Not until this question do I realise how little intuition I have for heights and depths... I can't remember what the numbers on contour maps are or anything. 8-40 miles?
no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 03:16 pm (UTC)I think a few too many of the questions are/could be based on an estimate of the size of the Earth. Distances on a scale of miles rather than metres, millimetres or light years.
Discussing it with Rachael, we conclude that the low scores aren't really an expression of overconfidence (as our hesitancy comments), but just a reluctance to post a vastly large range.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 11:06 am (UTC)Yeah, I think so. I think I was actually having fun answering at 70% or similar, regardless of what I was supposed to be doing. Which might actually be better, if you don't really know an answer -- of a normal curve, 90% is, I think, quite a bit, and people prefer to have a good chance of being fairly close to right, than a very good chance of being within several orders of magnitude :)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 11:48 am (UTC)We did this exercise in Dr MacKay's lectures once - most people were very overconfident about their guesses, or unwilling to be truthful about their lack of confidence (I on the other hand was entirely confident that I had no idea and most of the questions, and my biggest problem was guessing what Large Number would be a plausible upper bound (er, it looks silly when you put "entire size of universe" kind of scale numbers for a number of objects present on Earth), I'm terrible with visualising big numbers).
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 11:58 am (UTC)