[HN Gopher] Fermi Calculation Examples
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       Fermi Calculation Examples
        
       Author : sieste
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2022-10-01 09:05 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.gwern.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.gwern.net)
        
       | afpx wrote:
       | Gives me flashbacks of high school Mensa meetings.
        
         | user_named wrote:
         | Gwern is an extremely strange site
        
           | in3d wrote:
           | I wish there were more sites and people thinking like this.
        
           | TheBlight wrote:
           | Gwern is a person
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | HaukeHi wrote:
       | There's an amazing calibration training game where you can
       | practice Fermis and see where you are orders of magnitude off:
       | 
       | https://www.quantifiedintuitions.org/calibration
        
         | ASalazarMX wrote:
         | > [SIGN IN WITH GOOGLE]
         | 
         | Eh. Maybe later.
        
       | taneq wrote:
       | I do this kind of stuff all the time (guesstimate or back-of-the-
       | envelope a value for every number relevant to a hypothetical,
       | then smoosh 'em together to come up with a thumb suck value to
       | sanity-check an idea.) It's great, and the comparison to
       | dimensional analysis is spot on.
        
       | whatshisface wrote:
       | Fermi estimation is just adding up the number of digits of every
       | factor, what's really hard about answering these questions is
       | having an encyclopedic knowledge of random quantitative trivia.
        
         | buescher wrote:
         | The trick is to just guess - with enough steps your errors will
         | cancel each other out, unless you're grossly wrong, in which
         | case you can go back and fix it. Back when these were common
         | interview questions, because Microsoft did it, bad interviewers
         | would pick at whether you knew the "right" number for each
         | step.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Can someone make a progress-indicator based on this idea?
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-01 23:01 UTC)