Fermi method (1), sometimes called a Fermi estimate, is one of the most useful ways to improve the accuracy of our brains natural reasoning processes for both t

Fermi method (1), sometimes called a Fermi estimate, is one of the most useful ways to improve the accuracy of our brains natural reasoning processes for both technical and non technical topics. It's actually a form of Bayesian estimation (2) and habituating the problem solving method helps enhance our brains in built inference systems. We all get an intuition of how things work and "feel", and by decomposing those feelings and intuitions into smaller pieces and rationally considering the likelihoods of those pieces we can improve them. By habitually doing this we can improve the brains natural estimation processes which improves our decision making ability. Lastly but importantly, the detail that separates the Fermi method from regular reasoning/socratic method/etc is estimation of the uncertainty of various assumptions. This can be used to figure out how to quickly get specific knowledge to drastically improve the estimation with minimal effort/time. Fermi used that last bit at the first nuclear explosion test to realize that dropping a few pieces of paper and seeing the distance they blew would give him enough info to get an accurate order of magnitude estimate of the yield onsite (3). He got 10 kilotons of tnt vs the official 21. 1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsEppdvgRisz5xAHG/fermi-estimates https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsEppdvgRisz5xAHG/fermi-esti... 2: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/history/FermiBayes.pdf https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/history/FermiBayes.pdf 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#Historical_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#Historical_backg...