The Estimation Game: a monthly Fermi estimation web app

[Sage]

Announcing the first monthly Estimation Game!

• Answer 10 Fermi estimation questions, like “How many piano tuners are there in New York?”

• Train your estimation skills and get more comfortable putting numbers on things

• Team up with friends, or play solo

• See how your scores compare on the global leaderboard

• The game is around 10-40 minutes, depending on how much you want to discuss and reflect on your estimates

You can play The Estimation Game on Quantified Intuitions, solo, or with friends. The February game is live for one week (until Sunday 26th).

We’ll release a new Estimation Game each month. Lots of people tell us they’d like to get more practice doing BOTECs and estimating, but they don’t get around to it. So we’ve designed The Estimation Game to give you the impetus to do a bit of estimation each month in a fun context.

You might use this as a sandbox to experiment with different methods of estimating. You could decompose the question into easier-to-estimate quantities—make estimates in your head, discuss with friends, use a bit of paper, or even build a scrappy Guesstimate or Squiggle model.

We’d appreciate your feedback in the comments, in our Discord, or at [e-mail]. We’d love to have suggestions for questions for future rounds of The Estimation Game—this will help us keep the game varied and fun in future months!

Info for organisers

If you run a community group or meetup, we’ve designed the Estimation Game to be super easy to run as an off-the-shelf event. Check out our info for organisers page for resources and FAQs.

If you’re running a large-scale event and want to run a custom Estimation Game at it, let us know and we can help you set it up. We’re planning to pilot custom Estimation Games at EAGx Nordics (and maybe EAGx Cambridge).

About Quantified Intuitions

We built Quantified Intuitions as an epistemics training site. See our previous post for more on our motivation. Alongside the monthly Estimation Game, we’ve made two permanent tools:

• Pastcasting: Predict past events to rapidly practise forecasting

• Calibration: Answer EA-themed trivia questions to calibrate your uncertainty

Thanks to our test groups in London, to community builders who gave feedback, in particular Robert Harling, Adash Herrenschmidt-Moller, and Sam Robinson, and to Chana Messinger at CEA for the idea and feedback throughout.

[titotal]

Fun game, great job!

Giving feedback, my only quibble would be with the “prime california zip codes” question. I’m not from the US so I only have a vague idea of what a zip code is, I don’t know how many digits are in one and how dense they are, so anyone in the US has a signficant advantage in that question over me. Americans get a similar leg up in the “netflix US” question, but it’s not as bad cause netflix is more universal.

Obviously it’s not a big deal (I got both questions right anyway), but it might be worth thinking about issues like that in the future. Perhaps by providing a few relevant details to put everyone on the same page, or by including a clause in the “don’t look things up” rule.

[Adam Binksmith]

Thanks very much for the feedback, this is really helpful!

If anyone has question suggestions, I’d really appreciate them! I think crowdsourcing questions will help us make them super varied and globally relevant. I made a suggestion form here https://​​forms.gle/​​792QQAfqTrutAH9e6

[Angelina Li]

Wow, thank you so much for this! I was looking for exactly this type of product a couple of months ago, and was feeling frustrated at the lack of good options in this niche.

Really excited to try this out!

[Forslack]

I would like to use the site without logging in. A Google account is required to use the site (pastcasting, calibration, estimation game). This is an unnecessary hurdle. Not everyone has or wants a Google account. From a technical point of view everything could work without logging in (using cookies or localstorage for persistent state) and I would be fine with not being able to show up on the leaderboards.

I understand that the Google login makes it easier for you to make the site and this might be an unreasonable request.

[Adam Binksmith]

Thanks for the feedback Forslack! I’m curious whether you’d prefer to play without logging in because you don’t have a Google account or because you don’t want to share your email?

[Jason]

Not Forslack, but if you’re going to ask for permission for Google to share all that info you should have a clear privacy policy visible for what you’ll do with it. Also, I don’t think you have to request all that info from Google, like real name, to use a Google login.

[Kei]

Thanks for making this! It was a lot of fun to play and I imagine it will be good practice.