3 ms·
If I were doing something vaguely similar, I might emphasize: - Bounds rather than point estimates. Hard bounds (definitely more/less than this) and soft bound
by mncharity 2y ago
If I were doing something vaguely similar, I might emphasize:
- Bounds rather than point estimates. Hard bounds (definitely more/less than this) and soft bounds (likely). With associated payoffs/penalties. A point estimate too, but bounds first. Like error bars in a plot.
Perhaps even "bet your certainty" custom hardness. Perhaps an advanced "draw your payoff curve", so one might draw a hard step-function low bound with some soft slope on the high bound. So one might draw a big-payoff pointy spike, at the risk of missing entirely. A pretty UI might even multiply the curves for you. Perhaps one gets points for each component estimate, not just the final result - though might need an LLM to cope with the variety of possible steps in reasoning.
- Order of magnitude. That's "is it more like 1/10, 1, 10, 100, 1000" etc. One can do "high/middle/low order 10^n". But oom estimation a different mindset than linear. Exponential not linear. Linear slider as UX smell.
- Permit multiple chains of reasoning. An argument that nicely establishes a hard lower bound may be of no help in firming up a high bound. And a bound may need to be hammered with multiple chains of reasoning to tighten it up.
Fermi estimation can be the aggregation of exponential-rough-quantitative reasoning with attention to confidence/uncertainty.
In a group setting, one might have: "Ok everyone, how many cats live on this block? Is it more like 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc? Can anyone suggest a bound?" "I saw one in the window this morning - so hard lower bound of 1." "Unless it's been taken to a vet." "The town human population is 10^6, so it seems unlikely the block has that many cats..." "What does everyone think?" "How confident?" "Can anyone suggest another chain of reasoning? Can we tighten up the bounds?" "Could we do a stepping stone problem, the number of households on the block?"
Perhaps a "bet coins" on the answer before grading? One advantage of bounds vs more-common point-estimates is it pulls up the handling of confidence where it can be seen and improved. So anything which encourages reflection and self-evaluation, like betting, might help with that. Another advantage of bounding is it makes each attempt at narrowing bounds, on each component, into it's own little fractal estimation problem. So an initial estimation question proliferates many others. I wonder how a UI might emphasize that...?
But all that riffs on the Fermi estimation aspect, not the Wordle aspect.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andrewrn 2y agoWow, thanks for the very thoughtful feedback. You're right I think bounds makes more sense. And I also like the bets idea where perhaps the user has a budget of bound softness they can use on the factors that they're least confident about. These would definitely make a richer, more gamified experience. I'd like to add all these elements, but the challenge will be packaging it all intelligibly into the UX, which is struggling even on this initial basic mvp version. The idea originated because I thought it would be really cool to get good at making these quick estimates, for practical usage in everyday life. So I'm trying to strike a balance between a really rich, complex game, and a little tool to just build mathematical thinking habit and ability. Your mention of team-based estimation where people use one another to whittle down estimates reminds me of this competition I came across while researching: https://estimathon.com/about https://estimathon.com/about. It's very related to this project. Social features, starting with something simple like "you guessed closer than x% of people!" are something that I want to add but I hadn't thought of an almost team-based gameplay like you suggest. Definitely intriguing... Thanks so much!