Meta-quiz Meme

[jack]

Related 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 :)

Comments

[midnightmelody.livejournal.com]

I dispute that 4 has one correct answer! (It depends whose canon we're using.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

2 also has two correct answers.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Apparently so. Do you know which are most common? I knew it would be controversial, but just picked an answer off wikipedia, but apparently Chris's test (below) used a different one. A check on wikipedia shows plausible answers would be:

* From the basin to lake victoria
* From the basin the head of the blue nile
* From the basin to the head of the longest stream which feeds lake victoria

But I don't know which two are 4100 and 3400 miles :)

[naath.livejournal.com]

It's the length from the start of the Blue Nile to the Med or the start of the White Nile to the med (that are the given measurements, aiui).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks. And you never know, now I might actually remember it, there's nothing like getting a question mildly wrong to sear it in your memory forever :) (My first estimate was "How long can it be? Well imagine it's in Asia and really wiggly, say that's 1/6 of the circumference of the earth wide...")

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) Conveniently, if you mark your own, it doesn't actually matter. This only occurred to me when I went to look up my answer, that it might vary, but I just said "OK, then my answer refers to the King James Bible" and checked for that.

I guess that would also allow people to give a more precise answer, if you know for a fact which canons have 39, you can go on giving information until you're only 90% certain :) (Although that's not really very practical :))