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

[liv]

Interesting, and a good selection of questions to estimate.
My guesses:
1. 30-50
2. 500-3000 miles
3. 6-20
4. (I know the answer, it's 39)
5. 200-1500 miles (ugh)
6. 50 tonnes-200 tonnes (also pretty wild)
7. 1690-1780
8. 6-30 months
9. 5000-8000 miles
10. 1-5 miles

score: 1 yes, 2 no, 3 yes, 5 way wrong, 6 yes (to my surprise), 7 yes, though I chose probably an unfairly wide range, 8 yes, 9 yes, 10 yes. 7/9, which as the comments to the God Plays Dice post pointed out, isn't totally horrible for a 90% confidence interval. I feel stupid about 5 though.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

1. 25-50 yes 39
2. 400-4000mi no 4100mi
3. 5-15 yes 12
4. 20-25 no also 39 (oops)
5. 2000-5000mi yes 2160mi
6. 5T-30T no 58T
7. 1650-1850 yes 1756
8. 6m-1y no 22m (ouch, this fact rang a bell when I looked it up)
9. 3000-6000mi no 9500mi
10. 3-20 mi yes 11000m

5/10. Hm.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

That is indeed a really interesting exercise. My reaction to a lot of those it "argh, I have no idea!" but that doesn't really matter - it just means I have to give a big range.

OK, then:
1. 35-48
2. 300-700 miles
3. 4-10
4. 39 (This is the only one I know the actual answer to, so I can't satisfy the "90% confidence" requirement :)
5. 1000-3000 miles
6. 30-100 tonnes
7. 1780-1820
8. 9-18 months
9. 4000-6000 miles
10. 1000 feet-10 miles (blarg, really no idea)

Some are definitely harder than others. Most of the questions reminded me of the stereotypical "how many petrol stations in the country"-type interview questions. You can't expect to get those quite right, but you can estimate various things and multiply them together and get a plausible answer. But for some of them (like the last one) I really felt I had nothing to go on.

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, I'm going to do so badly at this! But I'll have a go...

1. 35-50
2. Um, 1,000-5,000?? It's very long, put it that way.
3. 10-30
4. 39
5. Um, OK, it's a lot smaller than Earth so... let's say 800-3,000
6. I'm crap at weights. 1-100 tonnes
7. 1756
8. 15-25 months (though I think it's just under 2 yrs, but could be wrong)
9. I think we're talking somewhere near half the Earth's circumference, and that's about 20,000 miles, so I'll say 7,000-12,000 miles
10. God, I've no idea. I don't even know what to do it in. Feet? Let me see, I suppose there's potential for it to be as the highest point on land is high, IYSWIM. I'll guess 5,000-20,000 feet.

*goes to check answers*

Oh, how cool, I got them all. But only by seriously hedging my bets on 6 and 10, though! It was mostly just logical guessing, though I knew two of the answers exactly.

It strikes me that it would be possible to do some sort of scaling thing with this to give you quite a precise score on how you did, which would be cool. And indeed would remind me of the Professionals episode I was watching last night with old computers and assessments of agents' mental agility.

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

I fear these will be embarrassingly wide too... (Written without looking at anyone else's comments)

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?

[midnightmelody.livejournal.com]

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

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

This was the idea behind Chris Lightfoot's 2004 estimation quiz. He applied his usual high-powered statistical analysis to the results in this blog entry.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'm completely confident that I have pretty much no idea of the answers to any of these...


Guesses
1 - adult, so more than 20 but less than 100 because few people get older than that
2 - long (heh), er, more than 50 miles but less than 5000, actually I have no idea what 5000 miles looks like; so I pulled that number out of my head. also which, there are two branches...
3 - more than 1 and less than "all countries" which is O(100) or so.
4 - more than the 7 I can name and less than 100 which would make for a really fat book.
5 - help, more with the "visualise big numbers" problem. Well, more than 100 miles and less than 100,000 miles.
6 - more big number. Between 1000 and 100,000 kg
7 - well, Mozart wasn't Medieval or Modern... so, er, somewhere between 1500 and 1900.
8 - I remember that this is "long"... more than 8months and less than 2 years
9 - argh! bignumbers. More than 100miles and less than 20,000 miles.
10 - Mariana Trench (heh, I knew that), I also think that it's deeper than Everst is high, but that doesn't help because I don't know that number either! More than 1mile but less than 100 miles.

(Surprisingly this is actually 9/10 within range, 6 is too low; although as I suspected my grasp of how big the big numbers actually are is hugely off and most of the length answers are at the lower end of my range)