5 ms·
Fermi Calculation Examples
- afpx 4y agoGives me flashbacks of high school Mensa meetings.
- user_named 4y agoGwern is an extremely strange site
- amelius 4y agoCan someone make a progress-indicator based on this idea?
- remram 4y agoSomething that shows you're between 10% and 100% done?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HaukeHi 4y agoThere'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 https://www.quantifiedintuitions.org/calibration
- ASalazarMX 4y ago> [SIGN IN WITH GOOGLE] Eh. Maybe later.
- whatshisface 4y agoFermi 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 4y agoThe 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.
- taneq 4y agoI 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.