How good are you at estimating things you might know almost nothing about?
In The Estimation Game, we'll tackle 10–15 non-trivial questions such as:
If all the photos uploaded to Instagram in one day were printed on a single continuous roll of film, how long would the roll be?
How many African elephants' worth of cargo pass through Heathrow Airport in a year?
For each question, you'll work together with a team to give a 90% confidence interval: a lower and upper bound such that you believe there's a 90% chance the true answer lies somewhere between them.
We'll then reveal the answers, compare approaches, and see how well calibrated we actually are.
The point isn't to already know the answers. It's to practice Fermi estimation: breaking seemingly impossible questions into smaller pieces, making reasonable assumptions, and getting surprisingly close with limited information.
By the end, you'll have a much better sense of whether your “90% confident” actually means 90% — and where your intuition tends to be over- or underconfident.
Duration: approximately 2–2.5 hours
Format: Group estimation game and discussion
Location: 48.148026, 11.570904
No special knowledge or preparation required. Just bring your curiosity and willingness to put some numbers on things you don't know.
How good are you at estimating things you might know almost nothing about?
In The Estimation Game, we'll tackle 10–15 non-trivial questions such as:
For each question, you'll work together with a team to give a 90% confidence interval: a lower and upper bound such that you believe there's a 90% chance the true answer lies somewhere between them.
We'll then reveal the answers, compare approaches, and see how well calibrated we actually are.
The point isn't to already know the answers. It's to practice Fermi estimation: breaking seemingly impossible questions into smaller pieces, making reasonable assumptions, and getting surprisingly close with limited information.
By the end, you'll have a much better sense of whether your “90% confident” actually means 90% — and where your intuition tends to be over- or underconfident.
Duration: approximately 2–2.5 hours
Format: Group estimation game and discussion
Location: 48.148026, 11.570904
No special knowledge or preparation required. Just bring your curiosity and willingness to put some numbers on things you don't know.
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