5/8

Apparantly I am bad at estimation.

I'd only missed one, and then I got frustrated with the question about cramming all the world's people together. The options were large city, a state, small country, or the US. But what size state? Massachusetts? Texas? Texas IS the size of a small country. So I guessed the US because it was the only specific answer.

I think I'm generally good at estimation (6/8), but I need the choices to be specific before I can get general about the whole thing.

I think I just learned something about myself.

4/8. Although I was sure about those 4.

1/8 But I knew I was horrible at estimating. (Also, the one about Spiderman was gibberish to me.)

1/8 as well BP.

2/8 only because I guessed right. One of the few things I'm really, really bad at is estimating. At my old job I would estimate that a book would be 4 volumes, and it would turn out to be 1, or vice versa.

4/8. . .with a few guesses that broke either way.

I win at losing so far - not a single answer correct.

i suck at this. i have no basis of reference for almost any of these. how the hell should i know about spiderman's ability to bonk a hamster?

Heh, I did not do well.

I estimated that I would get around 3 or 4 questions right. Not even close.

I don't like the Spiderman question because it relies on a unit of measure that most people don't encounter routinely so it's not really testing the right thing, in my opinion. When these problems are well-designed the only "frame of reference" you need is little bit of experience with numbers of different magnitudes. The central park question, for example, doesn't require you to live in New York or know detailed physiological facts about squirrels to rule out most of the answers as completely ludicrous. And I do think, as is more or less the point of the related article, that if you haven't developed the ability to recognize those answers as completely ludicrous then you're effectively illiterate in the face of information that you're presented with every day. Not it's anything particularly shameful any more than being unable to read big words, but if you have a blind spot, surely at least being aware of it is to your advantage.

I think for some of these I'm just bad at math. For example, I estimated that 6 billion people would take up at bou 6 billion square feet of area. Surely only Asia is that big...

...except 6 billion square feet is only a few hundred square miles.

I love that Google can do that so deftly. It's so much fun to play with. But, you see, I your misstep in going from a number to a region with the appropriate size has nothing whatsoever to do with being good at math or bad at math in any broader sense. Your misjudge of area is likely related to basic human cognition and perception quirks that cause everyone to make wild misestimates when going from linear measure like feet to square or cubic measures, and you could have a PhD in math without ever having noticed that at all. As silly as this might sound, muddgirl, taking the single step of recognizing that an estimate of the area required by one person is necessary and making a good one says to me that you're way above the median in mathematical thinking. You did the mathematical part instinctively and flawlessly and were only stymied by experience for the latter part. It's like... my dad can look at any tree in the woods and tell you how many board feet of lumber are in it, and I can't. And while that irritates me a bit - apparently not enough to do anything about it, though - I don't think it says anything about my mathematical ability.