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It is a well-known fact in that people tend to think that they know more than they really do. Lots of psychology experiments have shown this. But really, it's a lot more to find out for yourself just how overconfident we human beings tend to be.
Self-Test of Overconfidence
For each of the following, give a 90% confidence interval (an upper and lower bound). That is to say, you should be confident enough in your interval that you would take a 9:1 bet that the actual number is between the range you give (or take a 1 to 9 bet that the actual number is outside your range). Write down or record what your ranges are before looking at the answers so that you don't cheat.
1.) Martin Luther King's age at death
2.) Length of the Nile River (in miles)
3.) Number of countries in OPEC
4.) Number of books in the Old Testament
5.) Diameter of the moon (in miles)
6.) Weight of an empty Boeing 747 (in pounds)
7.) Year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born
8.) Gestation period of an Asian elephant (in days)
9.) Air distance from London to Tokyo (in miles)
10.) Deepest known point in the ocean (in feet)
+ Show Spoiler +
Give yourself a point for each range that contained the actual value. If your confidence in your intervals were really 90%, that means on average at least 9 of your answers should be right. In previous experiments and surveys, this happens about 1% of the time or less. Are you surprised at your result?
Poll: How many did you get right?
(Vote): 10
(Vote): 9
(Vote): 8
(Vote): 7
(Vote): 6
(Vote): 5
(Vote): 4
(Vote): 3
(Vote): 2
(Vote): 1
(Vote): 0
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Baa?21243 Posts
Uhm, you didn't actually limit us. So I could do 1 - 1000000 for all my intervals...?
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if that's how much self-confidence you honestly have, then technically yes... would you also be willing to take a 1 to 9 bet that any of your answers are wrong though?
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A lot of these questions I have ABSOLUTELY no idea so I don't have confidence in my answer at all
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If you have no idea, then just put a really wide range 
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Baa?21243 Posts
Wow I totally forgot that 90% confidence interval. Sorry, it's late D:
(Never did pay attention in stats :D)
Doing them now...
edit: 8. Damn you Nile and elephants.
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On July 31 2009 00:31 azndsh wrote:If you have no idea, then just put a really wide range
I think I'll just put 1 to a million for all of them
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On July 31 2009 00:20 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Uhm, you didn't actually limit us. So I could do 1 - 1000000 for all my intervals...?
You need to think about if you would take the bet both ways, if you put 0 - a google plex you wouldn't actually take the bet against your range even if you got 9 dollars back if you put in one.
I'm not sure this proves what the OP thinks it does. Some of those (the elephant gestation period for example) are examples of things people are likely to get wildly wrong and you can pick and choose outliers like that to trip people up.
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I am not surprised at my results, the only one I had any idea about whatsoever was the first one (which I was off by 3 years). Titling the thread "overconfidence" probably makes people less confident in their predictions, though.
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On July 31 2009 00:32 Eniram wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 00:31 azndsh wrote:If you have no idea, then just put a really wide range I think I'll just put 1 to a million for all of them
I don't think you get the point of the experiment. But ya that would work if you seriously thought there were between 1 to 1 million contries in opec.
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South Africa4316 Posts
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p
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The only thing I got right was the OPEC one  and I missed the MLK one because I misread it and thought it was the year of his death, although for what it's worth I was right on that =/
Edit: and until I read the rest of this thread, I completely misunderstood the point of the ranges, and used a different range (that I thought was reasonable for the specific questions) on each question.
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make this in the metric system and this test proves nothing but useless knowledge
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Calgary25980 Posts
This is stupid because the answers in themselves are shocking. Sure you should account for that in your interval, but the test is pitted against you. If they were questions with reasonable answers in everyday things this would hold a lot more weight for me.
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it seems that i am underconfident if anything.
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On July 31 2009 00:55 nK)Duke wrote:
make this in the metric system and this test proves nothing but useless knowledge If I'm understanding it right, it actually does prove that people tend to be overconfident in their knowledge (even of normally useless trivia) since they get to pick the range that they believe they could guess most of the answer in.
Edit: although Chill makes a good point as well.
Edit2: although do the people this test is used on know that it's random trivia? Or are they led to believe that the test is composed of everyday/common knowledge?
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On July 31 2009 00:46 Daigomi wrote:
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p
That's a potentially interesting paper that I'd be interested in reading. I think the experiment is designed fine, just that the conclusion to be drawn is "people have no idea what a 90% confidence interval means" rather than "people are overconfident".
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My guesses:
1. 38 years
2. 4000 miles
3. 13 countries (100% certain)
4. 39 books (46 in the Catholic canon)
5. 2000 miles
6. 250 000 pounds
7. 1756 (100% certain)
8. 350 days
9. 6000 miles
10. 50 000 feet
For #6 I extrapolated approximate weight from the upper estimates on the mass of the largest dinosaurs, which were of similar length to the Boeing 
For #8 I knew that elephants were one of the few animals which had a longer period than humans, but thought it was about a year, or 16 months at most. My memory on this one was obviously faulty.
For #10 my memory was also faulty, as I recalled the deepest point of the Mariana trench being about double the height of Everest.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 01:09 searcher wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 00:46 Daigomi wrote:
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p That's a potentially interesting paper that I'd be interested in reading. I think the experiment is designed fine, just that the conclusion to be drawn is "people have no idea what a 90% confidence interval means" rather than "people are overconfident".
Strangely enough, the topic I gave earlier was my preliminary topic before I did my literature review. I've since then decided to focus specifically on the anchoring and adjustment heuristic, and the 90% confidence level you mention is explained quite nicely by anchoring and adjustment.
Basically, when you provide people with a figure, they take that figure and adjust it in the direction they believe the answer lies, but adjust it insufficiently. So if you say "Was Mozart born before or after 1850?", people will look at that 1850, and think "it was definitely before 1850, so I'll say about 1785". In contrast, if you ask people "Was Mozart born before or after 1650?" they will look at the question and think "it was definitely after 1650, so I'll guess about 1715." So basically, you anchor on a starting value, and then adjust insufficiently in the direction the answer lies.
The same happens if you define an anchor for yourself. For example, with the question "how old was MLK when he died?" I did the follwoing. I know that average life expectancy was 65-70, and the fact that I'd never seen a photo of MLK as an old man made me think that he died young, so I took the 65-70, aeddjust it downwards to account for his young age, and I ended up guessing he was about 45-50 when he died (thus, my adjustment wasn't sufficient). This guess should be a reasonable odds guess, lets say 65:35. Then you adjust the value even more to increase the probability of you being right, but once again this adjustment is not significant enough. I adjusted mine to 40-65, missing his birth with 1 year. However, if I really wanted to be 90% sure, I should have adjusted it to 30-75 probably.
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Can't imagine this is a good judge of over confidence, if you can't admit you don't know something then you're ignorant and conceded...
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It's more a test of memory. Most people should have come across most of these "facts" sometime in their lifetime, and some people are better with recalling numbers than others.
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Some questions are related to U.S. users only. Some facts I came across are only in the metric system.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 02:11 MoltkeWarding wrote:
It's more a test of memory. Most people should have come across most of these "facts" sometime in their lifetime, and some people are better with recalling numbers than others.
It's not a test of memory. If it was a test of memory, people would simply be asked the answers, not asked to give a range.
The questions were chosen specifically to be arbitrary, with most people not knowing the answer (at least not exactly). If people don't know the answer exactly, they can define a range which they will have confidence in. The point of the exercise is to show that people who are too confident define ranges that are too small.
Also, the fact that these results are unexpected is important. If they just asked you the age of someone who died at what is an expected age (lets say 65), then most people would get the right answer right "by accident", and it would have nothing to do with their confidence. These questions are made to be unexpected, but that's because, to be 90% sure of a question you don't know the answer to, your range should include unexpected results. For example, Mozart's birth. If you know that he was born in the 18th century somewhere, and he died late in the 18th century, then you might be 50% confident that he was born somewhere between 1740-1760, since people didn't get too old in those days. However, to be 90% confident, you should increase that range to 1710 (in case he live until he was 70 or 80 years old) to 1770 in case he died in his twenties still. Obviously the more knowledge you have, the more confident you can be and the smaller your range can be.
The fact is, for you to be 90% confident, you should be willing to lose 90$ for the chance to gain 11$ if you're right. So, if you don't know the answer, you should choose a range that would include unexpected answers, otherwise you'd just lose money on all the questions that you didn't know the answer to.
And to those saying it's not a good judge of confidence, it is only a quick test, so it's not perfect. There are way more detailed psychological tests on the topic. However, both the validity and reliability of the test are fairly high, so it's not a bad test either.
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On July 31 2009 00:58 Chill wrote:
This is stupid because the answers in themselves are shocking. Sure you should account for that in your interval, but the test is pitted against you. If they were questions with reasonable answers in everyday things this would hold a lot more weight for me.
If someone asked me what was the greatest length from one point to another you could draw across the known universe, in feet, I really don't know the scope of the answer and would have to give an interval that goes across many orders of magnitude- same if I was asked for the weight of an atom, in pounds.
The only reasonable thing to do is to give yourself humongous error margins for questions about which you know very little about. I had a 14-4000 day range for the gestation period of an elephant, and I got 10/10.
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16987 Posts
Have you been reading The Black Swarn by Taleb?
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I don't really know the answers to any of these question. The closest I got was at the deepest known point in the ocen, but having to transform meters in feet is pretty hard.
Perhaps you should get an easier set of question so you could actually get more feedback from more people. The less the cultural enviroment counts the better.
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South Africa4316 Posts
Also, it It's important to point out that this is not a pub quiz or an IQ test, you don't beat the test by getting 10/10, or lose by getting 1/10. It's a measure of overconfidence. Getting 1/10 meant you were too confident in your ranges. Getting 10/10 meant you were not confident enough with your ranges. That's all.
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On July 31 2009 02:34 Empyrean wrote:Have you been reading The Black Swarn by Taleb?
I've heard a lot about that book, though I haven't read it personally. I'm not interested enough in finance to read it for now, though its conclusions are pretty enlightening.
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On July 31 2009 02:37 FirstBorn wrote:
I don't really know the answers to any of these question. The closest I got was at the deepest known point in the ocen, but having to transform meters in feet is pretty hard.
Uh... wat? You multiply by 3 and get a pretty close conversion :p
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Katowice25012 Posts
On July 31 2009 00:46 Daigomi wrote:
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p
This is an awesome idea for study. I've been doing a lot of casual reading on traders lately and it seems like you could do a lot here that would be interesting.
Taleb's writing is particularly entertaining for how much he hates everyone in his field.
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South Africa4316 Posts
I can't edit my posts again, damn annoying.
On July 31 2009 02:37 FirstBorn wrote:
I don't really know the answers to any of these question. The closest I got was at the deepest known point in the ocen, but having to transform meters in feet is pretty hard.
Perhaps you should get an easier set of question so you could actually get more feedback from more people. The less the cultural enviroment counts the better.
Culture shouldn't matter. The less you know, the less confident you should be, the larger your ranges should be. Where culture does matter, perhaps, is if people know the exact answer to some of the questions. People who know the exact answer to five of the questions, but then choose way too small ranges for the questions they have to estimate are just as overconfident as a person that chooses way too small ranges for everything because he has to estimate everything, but the test will give them different results.
Like I said though, the questions were chosen so that most people wouldn't know the answers perfectly. It's also meant to show that people tend to be overconfident, rather than measure how overconfident they are. If they wanted to measure actualy confidence levels, they would have to measure the size of your ranges, the size of the ranges you got right, etc.
On July 31 2009 02:46 heyoka wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 00:46 Daigomi wrote:
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p This is an awesome idea for study. I've been doing a lot of casual reading on traders lately and it seems like you could do a lot here that would be interesting.
It is quite an interesting field, and there's a fair amount of research on it already. My problem with most of the research though, is that it's done by economists with a basic understanding of psychology, rather than by psychologists with a basic understanding of economy. There's a place for both these groups, but it shouldn't be completely dominated by one group. For example, measuring how people react and interpret specific market situations might be best studied by a mostly-economist, as it would require an in-depth economic understanding of what those specific market situations are, and how they should be reacted to etc. However, studying confidence levels in traders should be studied by a mostly-psychologist, as the confidence test for traders and school-teachers and teenagers are basically the same. So you don't need detailed a detailed economic understanding to do the study, but you might need a detailed psychological understading to interpret the results. Which is why I think there's a gap for psychologists in the field still, and why I'm focusing on it 
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On July 31 2009 02:11 MoltkeWarding wrote:
It's more a test of memory. Most people should have come across most of these "facts" sometime in their lifetime, and some people are better with recalling numbers than others.
I think you misunderstood the test
Your not supposed to guess the exact numbers but give an upper and lower bound so that you are 90% of covering the exact value between them. I for example know very little about mozart, but I felt 90% sure he was born between 1550 and 1800 which turned out right.
8/10 btw
damn elephants
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16987 Posts
On July 31 2009 02:41 Zato-1 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 02:34 Empyrean wrote:Have you been reading The Black Swarn by Taleb? I've heard a lot about that book, though I haven't read it personally. I'm not interested enough in finance to read it for now, though its conclusions are pretty enlightening.
This exact test is covered in lots of detail in the book. I don't want to ruin it, so I'll spoiler it:
+ Show Spoiler +Basically, Taleb is talking about how in many cases, so called "experts" in a field don't do any better than, say, a cabdriver, but their confidence in their answers and thinking is much higher. If you're interested, Taleb tackles this question in the first chapter of the second part of his book, The Black Swan.
Now, to the OP, if you truly wanted to do something like this, I think you should've asked people about things that pretty much no one knows anything about. I'm sure people remember a ball-park range for things such as the length of the Nile, but if you had, say, a question like "combined ages of ministers of finance in Africa whose name begins with the letter O", you'd be more likely to get better results. People can form educated guesses (ok, number of countries in Africa is ___, so average number of ministers of finance whose name begins with the letter O is ___, and the average age of a minister of finance is ___...), but for some of the things you listed, I actually remembered the exact number from reading about it somewhere random.
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How can this test confidence when there is no incentive to limit the range of one's guesses? Say I did not know the weight of a Boeing 747, I would be almost certain that one was between 5 000 and 5 000 000 pounds.
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i really doubt anyone got 10 on that, unless they knew the test questions beforehand.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 03:05 MoltkeWarding wrote:
How can this test confidence when there is no incentive to limit the range of one's guesses? Say I did not know the weight of a Boeing 747, I would be almost certain that one was between 5 000 and 5 000 000 pounds.
The point of the exercise is to be 90% certain, not 100% certain. Also, read the other posts on the topic.
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3 Lions
United States3705 Posts
3/10, really shouldve gotten the one about the Old Testament though TT
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On July 31 2009 03:05 GG.Win wrote:
i really doubt anyone got 10 on that, unless they knew the test questions beforehand.
Lies, 10/10 was easy.
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Sweet, perfect score!
+ Show Spoiler +90% I am confident in my confidence levels. Of course, you could guess 1-1,000,000 on the first nine and then 0 on the tenth... + Show Spoiler [My Guesses] +1. MLK age: 30-50 2. Nile miles: 3000-5000 3. OPEC countries: 3-30 4. OT books: 39 5. Moon diameter: 2000-5000 6. Boeing pounds: 20,000-2,000,000 7. Mozart YOB: 1750-1770 8. Elephant gestation: 180-1000 9. London to Tokyo: 6000-11,000 10. Marianas depth: 35,000-70,000 + Show Spoiler [Actual Answers] +1.) 39 Years 2.) 4,187 Miles 3.) 13 Countries 4.) 39 Books 5.) 2160 Miles 6.) 390,000 Pounds 7.) 1756 8.) 645 Days 9.) 5,959 Miles10.) 36,198 Feet + Show Spoiler [Metric Answers] +1.) 39 Years 2.) 6,738 km3.) 13 Countries 4.) 39 Books 5.) 3,476 km6.) 180,000 kg7.) 1756 8.) 645 Days 9.) 9,590 km10.) 11,033 m+ Show Spoiler [Conversions] +1 mile = 1.609344 km (exact)
1 foot = 0.3048 m (exact)
1 pound = 0.453592368444 kg (approximate, I think)
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On July 31 2009 00:42 Bosu wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 00:32 Eniram wrote:On July 31 2009 00:31 azndsh wrote:If you have no idea, then just put a really wide range I think I'll just put 1 to a million for all of them I don't think you get the point of the experiment. But ya that would work if you seriously thought there were between 1 to 1 million contries in opec.
Oh no, I understand it entirely. I just don't think its setup very well. The questions should be something people might actually know.
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The objective of the test was not getting 10/10 lol
edit: 10/10 means you might have made intervals too wide
If you did manage to actually make 90% intervals, your most probable result would be 9/10
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the thing is i knew i have no clue about at least 2 of them, and i missed like half of them with a minimal margin. (Like 14-20, and the answer was 13, 34k-35k and the answer was 36k+ (i actually knew this one in meters, but it seems my calculations from meters to feets are wrong )) i really coudn't decide how large the inrevall should be. I wanted to give as narrow as possible, cuz what's fun in saying "between 1000 and 20000 miles"
And i had problems with counting in pounds, feets and miles, cuz around here everybody always uses kg, m, km and so on
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7/10
+ Show Spoiler +
I underestimated 3 of them:
Length of Nile: 4000 miles tops
Weight of 747: 200k pounds tops
Elephant: 500 days tops
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Katowice25012 Posts
Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 02:46 heyoka wrote:On July 31 2009 00:46 Daigomi wrote:
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p This is an awesome idea for study. I've been doing a lot of casual reading on traders lately and it seems like you could do a lot here that would be interesting. It is quite an interesting field, and there's a fair amount of research on it already. My problem with most of the research though, is that it's done by economists with a basic understanding of psychology, rather than by psychologists with a basic understanding of economy. There's a place for both these groups, but it shouldn't be completely dominated by one group. For example, measuring how people react and interpret specific market situations might be best studied by a mostly-economist, as it would require an in-depth economic understanding of what those specific market situations are, and how they should be reacted to etc. However, studying confidence levels in traders should be studied by a mostly-psychologist, as the confidence test for traders and school-teachers and teenagers are basically the same. So you don't need detailed a detailed economic understanding to do the study, but you might need a detailed psychological understading to interpret the results. Which is why I think there's a gap for psychologists in the field still, and why I'm focusing on it
Wooooooooooooow. I'm looking to do behavioral economic stuff after my undergrad, for that exact same reason. Where are you doing your grad work? Lets collaborate. Think of the possibilities....a team liquid published paper.
What books would you recommend for the trader stuff you mentioned earlier?
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On July 31 2009 03:20 Geo.Rion wrote:
And i had problems with counting in pounds, feets and miles, cuz around here everybody always uses kg, m, km and so on
Hey metric lovers, you don't need to convert your answers into English anymore!
+ Show Spoiler [Metric Answers] +1.) 39 Years
2.) 6,738 km
3.) 13 Countries
4.) 39 Books
5.) 3,476 km
6.) 180,000 kg
7.) 1756
8.) 645 Days
9.) 9,590 km
10.) 11,033 m
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 03:25 heyoka wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 02:46 heyoka wrote:On July 31 2009 00:46 Daigomi wrote:
It's funny, I've come across this exact test three times in the last two weeks (all in psychology text books).
I'm busy writing a research proposal for my postgrad studies, and my topic is "the use and prevalence of heuristics in day traders," so I've been reading a ton of stuff on stock market psychology, and this specific overconfidence test is included in almost all of the books. I got 1/10 for it, and missed about 4 of them with about 5%, so clearly if I was just a bit less confident, I would have done much better :p This is an awesome idea for study. I've been doing a lot of casual reading on traders lately and it seems like you could do a lot here that would be interesting. It is quite an interesting field, and there's a fair amount of research on it already. My problem with most of the research though, is that it's done by economists with a basic understanding of psychology, rather than by psychologists with a basic understanding of economy. There's a place for both these groups, but it shouldn't be completely dominated by one group. For example, measuring how people react and interpret specific market situations might be best studied by a mostly-economist, as it would require an in-depth economic understanding of what those specific market situations are, and how they should be reacted to etc. However, studying confidence levels in traders should be studied by a mostly-psychologist, as the confidence test for traders and school-teachers and teenagers are basically the same. So you don't need detailed a detailed economic understanding to do the study, but you might need a detailed psychological understading to interpret the results. Which is why I think there's a gap for psychologists in the field still, and why I'm focusing on it Wooooooooooooow. I'm looking to do behavioral economic stuff after my undergrad, for that exact same reason. Where are you doing your grad work? Lets collaborate. Think of the possibilities....a team liquid published paper. What books would you recommend for the trader stuff you mentioned earlier?
Haha, I sent a PM
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haha, I just finished reading The Black Swan this week... an interesting read definitely. I'm kind of surprised at the number of people who missed the point of this.
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Uh, reading is tech. I just looked at the questions and went wtf this is really hard. After figuring it out I got 7/10 inside the margin. Missed 6. 9. 2.. Metric system ftw :>
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This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know.
I don't completely understand what this was about, other than if people are naive or not. Doesn't seem like overconfidence has anything to do with it. I can still be overconfident yet take full advantage of the game.
Well... I guess that kind of is what overconfidence is...but I would never define it in this sort of arena, myself.
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On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know.
fixed. Read the op again.
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+ Show Spoiler +lol! what about the man that has to put up with several of them?
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My answer to all of them was "dont know" and I gave a 9 in confidence on that...
and im a narcissist in real life, so "nice" thread. Proves lots.
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On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know.
That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life.
Best of luck.
Also, read the first page?
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On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner.
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On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner.
It's obvious to everybody that you can get a perfect 10/10 if you just pick "negative infinity-infinity" for everything, but that's not exactly the point of the test.
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On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner.
On July 31 2009 00:37 Strayline wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 00:20 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Uhm, you didn't actually limit us. So I could do 1 - 1000000 for all my intervals...? You need to think about if you would take the bet both ways, if you put 0 - a google plex you wouldn't actually take the bet against your range even if you got 9 dollars back if you put in one.
Like I said, read the first page. The test isn't about setting bounds that you know include the correct answer, it's about setting bounds that you're 90% sure include the correct answer. In other words, you should be willing to take a bet either that you're right or that you're wrong (with the odds adjusted appropriately).
It's harder than one might think.
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On July 31 2009 05:35 Djabanete wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner. Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 00:37 Strayline wrote:On July 31 2009 00:20 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Uhm, you didn't actually limit us. So I could do 1 - 1000000 for all my intervals...? You need to think about if you would take the bet both ways, if you put 0 - a google plex you wouldn't actually take the bet against your range even if you got 9 dollars back if you put in one. Like I said, read the first page. The test isn't about setting bounds that you know include the correct answer, it's about setting bounds that you're 90% sure include the correct answer. In other words, you should be willing to take a bet either that you're right or that you're wrong (with the odds adjusted appropriately). It's harder than one might think. Unless someone knows mathematical probability such as game theory, its not so much adjusting for odds appropriately as it what I said, admitting weather you legitimately know the answer or not and responding in kind...
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner.
So the logical rational manner of being 90% sure is choosing an absurd number? How old was MLK when he died... if you're only 90% sure that he was between 1 and 200 years old, then you are underconfident.
A more realistic example is the diameter of the moon. Once again, you could say 1-100,000km, but if you're only 90% sure of that, then you're wildly underconfident. Thinking about it logically, the moon is smaller than the earth, so it can't have a diameter larger than that of the earth. The furthest air plane flight I think realistic is about 14,000km, but it's probably about 18,000km-24,000km from pole to pole. 21,000km is thus half the circumference of the Earth, which means the diameter would be 21,000km/3.14 = 7,000km. So just thinking about it logically, I'm basically 95%+ sure that moon's diameter is not bigger than 7000km. So I'll decrease it to say 4000km (still too big in my opinion, if you think about illustrations of the moon and Earth, but I want to be 90% sure), and the minimum I'll just have to guess. Is it possible that the moon's diameter is 10 times smaller than the Earth's? It's possible but not very likely... Still, I'd say 500km. So then I'd be 90% confident that the moon's diameter is between 500km and 4000km. So there you go. I have absolutely no idea what the moon's diameter is, but I can make a judgement in which I'm 90% confident. That would be a logical way of doing it.
Part of the point of the exercise is that we're not always completely rational, and that we are more confident in our own quick judgements than we should be. For instance Mozart. I knew Mozart was a romantic composer, and I knew baroque was in the 16th and 17th centuries, so romantic era had to be the 18th century. But instead of taking something I'd be 90% confident with, I did a few quick calculations and then said 1710-1750, when he was actually born in 1756. There's no way I should be 90% confident in that answer. I could have gotten the centuries of the baroque wrong, or gotten wrong that he was at the start of the 18th century, instead of the end. I could have been wrong that he wasn't at the very start of the 18th century. Instead of making a good judgement, I was too confident in my knowledge and made my range too small. That's the point of the exercise. That when people make estimates that they are 90% confident in (not 100%) their accuracy tends to be much lower. In fact, I read a study about three days ago that showed exactly how accurate people are. When people are 100% confident, they tend to be about 85% accurate, while people who are 90% confident are only 60% accurate. The point is that we are too confident in our own jdugements, and even though this test has it's faults, it makes that point well.
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On July 31 2009 05:43 Dazed_Spy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 05:35 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner. On July 31 2009 00:37 Strayline wrote:On July 31 2009 00:20 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Uhm, you didn't actually limit us. So I could do 1 - 1000000 for all my intervals...? You need to think about if you would take the bet both ways, if you put 0 - a google plex you wouldn't actually take the bet against your range even if you got 9 dollars back if you put in one. Like I said, read the first page. The test isn't about setting bounds that you know include the correct answer, it's about setting bounds that you're 90% sure include the correct answer. In other words, you should be willing to take a bet either that you're right or that you're wrong (with the odds adjusted appropriately). It's harder than one might think. Unless someone knows mathematical probability such as game theory, its not so much adjusting for odds appropriately as it what I said, admitting weather you legitimately know the answer or not and responding in kind...
Right, you first figure out if you know the answer (and the test is designed in such a way that people generally won't), and then you try to intuitively throw out a confidence interval. If the confidence interval is absurdly wide, you're doing it wrong, because the very definition implies that you should be 10% sure that the correct answer is not within the bounds you provide. In other words, you're not supposed to get every question "right". You're supposed to gamble. The objective of the test is not to figure out whether you're right or not, but whether you're good at gambling on your knowledge; and unless you're perfect at gambling on your knowledge (that is, over a large number of samples you have 90% of answers within your confidence intervals), you will either trust your knowledge too much (overconfidence) or not enough (underconfidence).
I think the test would be better if people had to provide 50% confidence intervals. Then people wouldn't get so hung up on getting the "right" answer and it would be easier to grasp the point of the test. It comes across as a trivia test but it actually isn't.
edit: massive ninja attack
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8/10
1) 30-45 years
2) 2485-4971 miles
3) 4-18 countries
4) 1-100 books
5) 1243-2485 miles
6) 11000-250000 pounds
7) 1730-1800
8) 90-500
9) 3100-6000 miles
10) 36000-59000 feet.
Got the airplane and elephant wrong. But I tried to think logically and state ranges that i was reasonably certain of. In the cases I had no idea whatsoever (old testament, elephant, and somewhat the airplane, i tried to widen the ranges).
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On July 31 2009 06:17 LaLuSh wrote:
5) 1243-2485 miles
Haha, where did this one come from? I'm curious since the other answers you gave were all nice round numbers
edit: Maximum estimate = (minimum estimate x2) - 1? I'm so confused.
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My (and Chill's for the record) objection is that some of the answers are, as he says, "shocking."
If I said to you "How many of each type of animal did Moses take on the Arc?"
and you said "Two"
and I said "Are you 99% confident?"
you would say "of course!"
but I would say "haha you're way to confident, it was Noah who took who took animals on the Arc!"
In my opinion, in the above example you were being perfectly logical about how certain you were. It was another psychological factor about how human beings follow stories they hear that made you wrong. I tricked you and I don't think the "You should always allow for a X% chance that I'm tricking you!" is a fair argument. The situation is not a game of cards, you are administering a test and should therefore be somewhat "fair" about the basic setup.
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On July 31 2009 00:58 Chill wrote:
This is stupid because the answers in themselves are shocking. Sure you should account for that in your interval, but the test is pitted against you. If they were questions with reasonable answers in everyday things this would hold a lot more weight for me.
I didn't find any of the answers shocking
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On July 31 2009 06:20 Strayline wrote:
My (and Chill's for the record) objection is that some of the answers are, as he says, "shocking."
If I said to you "How many of each type of animal did Moses take on the Arc?"
and you said "Two"
and I said "Are you 99% confident?"
you would say "of course!"
but I would say "haha you're way to confident, it was Noah who took who took animals on the Arc!"
In my opinion, in the above example you were being perfectly logical about how certain you were. It was another psychological factor about how human beings follow stories they hear that made you wrong. I tricked you and I don't think the "You should always allow for a X% chance that I'm tricking you!" is a fair argument. The situation is not a game of cards, you are administering a test and should therefore be somewhat "fair" about the basic setup.
I'm confused, which question in the OP is a trick question?
Your question is one in which everybody thinks they know the answer, and would know the answer, except that you're not asking what they think. None of the questions in the OP is trying to trick you, they're just estimation questions chosen so that people won't know the answer and are forced to guess. All of the questions are on a terrestrial scale and the answers are distances, times, dates, and two-digit numbers --- it's not like asking about weird physical quantities or things nobody's ever heard of.
What questions would you use?
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I had 4/10 and under-guessed most of the ones I had wrong. Interesting test, although I wouldn't say that this very basic test proves much.
By the way, I was slightly annoyed that you asked for non-metric estimates, as that meant I had to convert my estimates to non-metric. Since I'm too lazy to get a calculator, this may have further influenced my amount of wrong estimates.
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I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬
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If you're interested in a book discussing this from an economics / public choice perspective click
here. It deals with the "weird question" issue too in some ways. Caplan uses US survey data to show the average person is wrong on a LOT of clear-cut (you would think) issues. Errors don't "balance out" by the "miracle of aggregation" in large enough populations. This, he argues, is a problem for democracy.
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On July 31 2009 00:13 azndsh wrote:
It is a well-known fact in that people tend to think that they know more than they really do.
Is it a well known fact, or do we tend to THINK it's a well known fact? eh???
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Edit: damn browser.
Overconfidence is an established cognitive bias, demonstrated in a number of settings.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 06:20 Strayline wrote:
My (and Chill's for the record) objection is that some of the answers are, as he says, "shocking."
If I said to you "How many of each type of animal did Moses take on the Arc?"
and you said "Two"
and I said "Are you 99% confident?"
you would say "of course!"
but I would say "haha you're way to confident, it was Noah who took who took animals on the Arc!"
In my opinion, in the above example you were being perfectly logical about how certain you were. It was another psychological factor about how human beings follow stories they hear that made you wrong. I tricked you and I don't think the "You should always allow for a X% chance that I'm tricking you!" is a fair argument. The situation is not a game of cards, you are administering a test and should therefore be somewhat "fair" about the basic setup.
Which questions do you think are out to trick you though? The only two I can see that are surprising is the deepest point in the ocean, and the weight of an empty boeing.
1. He died ver young, but for you to be 90% sure you should include for that possibility.
2. Just a plain question. Africa is about 8000km from one end to the other, so with all the squiggles included it could easily be 4000km.
3. Another plain answer. We all know of at least four countries, but you should expect there to be quite a few small countries. 4-25 would be a safe bet here I think.
4. Once again, can't see how this can be deceitfully tricky. For some people it's common knowledge.
5. Once again, not very surprising. Compared with the earth, it just about fits.
6. This one I think is a bit surprising. I was sure it was heavy, so I guessed 50k-250k. Still, I could have gone even higher on my margins to be surer.
7. Nothing surprising about this one.
8. Maybe surprising if you assume that humans have the longest gestation period. Without knowing that humans have the longest gestation period, I can't see how you can assume that though. I'd expect it to be longer than humans, so 180-900 days would probably be my guess.
9. Straight-forward I think. Shorter than I expected, but it should be in your range.
10. Surprising to me. In fact, I don't get how it works... If the earth's diameter is roughly 12,000km (wiki), then surely you can't get a place that's deeper than 6,000km? Supposedly this place is 11,000km deep, so I don't really get it.
In the end, I really think there's only one question that's a "trick" question, that even if you think about it logically, you can get it wrong. The others you have varying degrees of knowledge on, and you should adjust your ranges to accomodate that.
On July 31 2009 06:36 VIB wrote:
I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬
This test is actually a proper test, designed to show something with minimum difficulty. And your second statement is stupid. If you didn't look at my profile, and I asked you to guess my age, but provide a minimum and maximum age, would you be able to come up with a range that you'd be 90% sure about? So, with very little information, you can make a judgement that you'd have 90% confidence in.
This test tests the same thing. When people have little information, can they provide ranges which they are 90% (not 100%) sure are accurate. It's not about how many answers you can get right or wrong, or how much you know. It's about having a justified sense of confidence in your answers. So yes, it is surprising. If I told thousands of people to make 10 predictions that the are 90% sure will come true, and the average is to get 3 predictions right, then that would prove something new and important. Not that this test is new, if I'm not mistaken it was designed somewhere between 1972-1984 (I'm about 70% sure of that)
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On July 31 2009 06:36 VIB wrote:
I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬
I'm amazed at the amount of people maligning the test before they bother to figure out what it's testing and what it does or doesn't prove. Hint: it's not an intelligence/trivia test.
Daigomi keeps ninja'ing the crap out of me. (He even writes longer posts than me.)
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On July 31 2009 06:02 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner. So the logical rational manner of being 90% sure is choosing an absurd number? How old was MLK when he died... if you're only 90% sure that he was between 1 and 200 years old, then you are underconfident. I wasn't aware that we were allowed to pick a range of his age, I thought we had to pick a specific answer and give a rate of our confidence for it. I.E: My answers [on all] were im 90% sure that I dont know what the answer was. I was right everytime!
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 06:50 Dazed_Spy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:02 Daigomi wrote:On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner. So the logical rational manner of being 90% sure is choosing an absurd number? How old was MLK when he died... if you're only 90% sure that he was between 1 and 200 years old, then you are underconfident. I wasn't aware that we were allowed to pick a range of his age, I thought we had to pick a specific answer and give a rate of our confidence for it. I.E: My answers [on all] were im 90% sure that I dont know what the answer was. I was right everytime!
Haha
On July 31 2009 06:48 Djabanete wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:36 VIB wrote:
I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬ Daigomi keeps ninja'ing the crap out of me. (He even writes longer posts than me.)
It's a bad habit
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On July 31 2009 06:48 Daigomi wrote:
10. Surprising to me. In fact, I don't get how it works... If the earth's diameter is roughly 12,000km (wiki), then surely you can't get a place that's deeper than 6,000km? Supposedly this place is 11,000km deep, so I don't really get it.
The answer is in feet :p
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On July 31 2009 06:50 Dazed_Spy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:02 Daigomi wrote:On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner. So the logical rational manner of being 90% sure is choosing an absurd number? How old was MLK when he died... if you're only 90% sure that he was between 1 and 200 years old, then you are underconfident. I wasn't aware that we were allowed to pick a range of his age, I thought we had to pick a specific answer and give a rate of our confidence for it. I.E: My answers [on all] were im 90% sure that I dont know what the answer was. I was right everytime!
You're clearly overconfident in your instruction-following abilities.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On July 31 2009 07:00 SonuvBob wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:48 Daigomi wrote:
10. Surprising to me. In fact, I don't get how it works... If the earth's diameter is roughly 12,000km (wiki), then surely you can't get a place that's deeper than 6,000km? Supposedly this place is 11,000km deep, so I don't really get it. The answer is in feet :p
Ahaha, oops I noticed that, but my conversions were just terrible. Still, then it's surprisingly not deep :p
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On July 31 2009 06:48 Daigomi wrote:
10. Surprising to me. In fact, I don't get how it works... If the earth's diameter is roughly 12,000km (wiki), then surely you can't get a place that's deeper than 6,000km? Supposedly this place is 11,000km deep, so I don't really get it.
It's 11,000 m, not km
edit: ninja'd
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Im surprised at how many people got 0's.. I imagined most people getting at least half =p
I guess i'm overconfident about other ppl's abilities
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On July 31 2009 07:14 Exteray wrote:
Im surprised at how many people got 0's.. I imagined most people getting at least half =p
I guess i'm overconfident about other ppl's abilities
I think many of the 0:s are people who didn't read op and tried to guess the exact values.
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These are like Trivia questions anyway.
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On July 31 2009 07:03 SonuvBob wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:50 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 06:02 Daigomi wrote:On July 31 2009 05:23 Dazed_Spy wrote:On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page? lol how is this even an issue of confidence? Its an issue of being a blind little twat or seeing reality for what it is. These questions arent taught anywhere. They arent going to be found anywhere in daily life. Almost every single person here should be able to immediately go "hm never bothered to read into this EVER, therefore my chance of answering it correctly is statistically non existent". If you think you can get the answer right despite knowing nothing on the subject, thats not being overly confident, its called a self induced delusion. I'm confident in my ability to reason, thus I answered as Travis did, in a logical rational manner. So the logical rational manner of being 90% sure is choosing an absurd number? How old was MLK when he died... if you're only 90% sure that he was between 1 and 200 years old, then you are underconfident. I wasn't aware that we were allowed to pick a range of his age, I thought we had to pick a specific answer and give a rate of our confidence for it. I.E: My answers [on all] were im 90% sure that I dont know what the answer was. I was right everytime! You're clearly overconfident in your instruction-following abilities. Well...then the test worked out and gave me a good answer anyways, did it not? Just through alternative means! :D
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On July 31 2009 06:48 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:36 VIB wrote:
I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬ If you didn't look at my profile, and I asked you to guess my age, but provide a minimum and maximum age, would you be able to come up with a range that you'd be 90% sure about? No I wouldn't, no human being possibly would. That is what you're missing. I have no way to calculate if I could be 90% sure of. There are many missing variables. I would have to guess what 90% is. And a guess is just that. A guess. Nothing else. You're trying to read too much into it. If you think you have any slightest idea of what the 90% of something you don't know is then you're over-confident already. And that I'm 100% sure of
Roll a 6-sided dice 10 times and the chance of guessing it right 9 out of 10 times is still less than 1%. This is what the test is accomplishing. The only difference is that the dice size varies randomly from one person to another. I could tell you the results would be less than 1% before anyone did that test, it's not shocking nor surpring nor new nor important nor anything other than a bunch of people being unlucky.
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Korea (South)17174 Posts
I'm not overconfident. I just know EVERYTHING.
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lol
this has nothing to do with overconfidence...
these are just random facts to show people they dont know everything
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I cheated and opened up the answers right away, because I'm not really interested in your confidence intervals, but rather the factual data of the answers
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On July 31 2009 05:03 jtan wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. fixed. Read the op again.
On July 31 2009 05:15 Djabanete wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 04:44 travis wrote:
This was easy because I am not stupid and put gigantic ranges for everything that I didn't know. That means you are hugely underconfident. You might want to consider some self-help books, this can be a real impediment to leading a normal life. Best of luck. Also, read the first page?
I read the first page.
"you should be confident enough in your interval that you would take a 9:1 bet that the actual number is between the range you give"
... so that's the goal... right?
so i answered correctly(gave a correct range) on every question
so how am i stupid and why do you guys say I didn't read the first page.
I was playing by the rules of the game, and I scored perfectly. How does that say anything about my confidence.
Basically, the lesson being taught in the OP is a lesson I already know very well. It's called "don't be a retarded fag who thinks he knows everything".
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Or wait.... is the OP asking us to answer the questions so that we are right 90% of the time?
If so... thats both worded poorly and is so weird and confusing how could you blame anyone for answering this incorrectly. And what would that have to do with confidence at all.
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are you trolling? If you'd included the rest of the very sentence you quoted you might have understood.
You should be equally willing to take a 1 : 9 bet that the actual number is outside your interval.
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I knew OPEC has 13 countries... go me?
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On July 31 2009 08:48 jtan wrote:are you trolling? If you'd included the rest of the very sentence you quoted you might have understood. You should be equally willing to take a 1  bet that the actual number is outside your interval.
so then wtf does this have to do with overconfidence
it's just about how well u know the answers.. nothing about confidence
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On July 31 2009 08:53 travis wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 08:48 jtan wrote:are you trolling? If you'd included the rest of the very sentence you quoted you might have understood. You should be equally willing to take a 1 bet that the actual number is outside your interval. so then wtf does this have to do with overconfidence
Ok. The point that the test tries to make is that when people are asked to make intervals of 90% certainty they make the intervals too narrow. If people actually made 90% intervals the most common result would be 9/10 on this test. The average being lower indicates people's intervals actually has lower confidence - they are overconfident.
That's the idea of the test anyway.
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The 4 questions I got right were the ones I had a 90% certainty I got right. The ones I got wrong was a 100% certainty I got wrong.
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Who the fuck cares about trivia? That's all these questions are. I think the real problem is people think they are more intelligent than they really are. That does not mean knowing when a certain president was born or how deep a certain part of the ocean is. It means being able to solve certain problems and form opinions based on critical thinking rather than biased instinct.
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10.
was pretty easy, just used wikipedia for most of em.
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Aww, I didn't want to be too greedy so I only chose 50% confidence and some I just didn't know. I got 4.
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I wasn't confident in any of those questions -- what does that mean?
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I got none of those right, just as I chose "I'm not getting any of these right."
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
revealing that the test is for overconfidence is going to render it less meaningful
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On July 31 2009 09:32 lazz wrote:
10.
was pretty easy, just used wikipedia for most of em.
LOL
the idea was to know them WITHOUT looking it up
these questions are just trivia.... nothing to do with overconfidence. more like a quiz to say whether you can go on jeopardy or not.
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I was right in all the ones I felt confident in answering, but that was only 8 of them. I think pride has a lot to do with overconfidence in your answers. Since there is no pride related in this experiment, I think it wont show as much. Also our reactions and perceptions to the answers are different since we know its an experiment and what you are testing.
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Only one I didn't know was MLK....the rest were just random info I remember from discovery channel or school.
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I didn't read that we were supposed to guess ranges, so I guessed actual values (I was wrong for all of them), and in total, I was off by 252 787. Thanks for stripping me of my confidence, azndsh
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United States24683 Posts
The test does not measure what it was intended to measure. It would be interesting if it was more balanced (going on what Chill said in the first page).
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On July 31 2009 06:19 Djabanete wrote:Haha, where did this one come from? I'm curious since the other answers you gave were all nice round numbers edit: Maximum estimate = (minimum estimate x2) - 1? I'm so confused.
Unit conversion km to miles. Used wolframalpha.
In kilometers it was x2
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On July 31 2009 12:21 micronesia wrote:
The test does not measure what it was intended to measure. It would be interesting if it was more balanced (going on what Chill said in the first page).
This thread definitely measures something, and the results sadden me.
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United States24683 Posts
On July 31 2009 12:43 SonuvBob wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 12:21 micronesia wrote:
The test does not measure what it was intended to measure. It would be interesting if it was more balanced (going on what Chill said in the first page). This thread definitely measures something, and the results sadden me.
Can you elaborate on what you mean? In the spirit of this thread I won't pretend I know what you are getting at.
edit: do you just mean that many people didn't understand what was expected of them when they should have?
edit2: like the way they would say "oh let me just use huge ranged and then I'll do really well on this quiz which proves I don't fit the negative stereotype..."
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This thread measures reading comprehension and a lot of people failed?
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United States24683 Posts
On July 31 2009 13:07 Xusneb wrote:
This thread measures reading comprehension and a lot of people failed?
The problem seems to be a bit deeper than reading comprehension.
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On July 31 2009 00:18 Boblion wrote:
0 and 0 lol
same
thought mlk was 43 but wasnt really confident
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On July 31 2009 12:52 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 12:43 SonuvBob wrote:On July 31 2009 12:21 micronesia wrote:
The test does not measure what it was intended to measure. It would be interesting if it was more balanced (going on what Chill said in the first page). This thread definitely measures something, and the results sadden me. Can you elaborate on what you mean? In the spirit of this thread I won't pretend I know what you are getting at. edit: do you just mean that many people didn't understand what was expected of them when they should have? edit2: like the way they would say "oh let me just use huge ranged and then I'll do really well on this quiz which proves I don't fit the negative stereotype..."
Nah, they at least understood the idea behind it. I mean the ones who didn't grasp it at all (look at the poll results =/).
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United States24683 Posts
On July 31 2009 13:20 SonuvBob wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 12:52 micronesia wrote:On July 31 2009 12:43 SonuvBob wrote:On July 31 2009 12:21 micronesia wrote:
The test does not measure what it was intended to measure. It would be interesting if it was more balanced (going on what Chill said in the first page). This thread definitely measures something, and the results sadden me. Can you elaborate on what you mean? In the spirit of this thread I won't pretend I know what you are getting at. edit: do you just mean that many people didn't understand what was expected of them when they should have? edit2: like the way they would say "oh let me just use huge ranged and then I'll do really well on this quiz which proves I don't fit the negative stereotype..." Nah, they at least understood the idea behind it. I mean the ones who didn't grasp it at all (look at the poll results =/).
Reminds me of the penis length poll.... that is... if 40% of tl was female.
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This is the most confusing thread I've ever stumbled upon.
How the hell am I supposed to assign a percentage value (quantitative) to my confidence (qualitative)? "Um... yea, this range feels 90%." I cannot reconcile this!
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On July 31 2009 00:58 Chill wrote:
This is stupid because the answers in themselves are shocking. Sure you should account for that in your interval, but the test is pitted against you. If they were questions with reasonable answers in everyday things this would hold a lot more weight for me.
Yes. Agreed 100%.
I was perplexed by many of these answers.
The test seems to be overly tricky to be conclusive.
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United States24683 Posts
On July 31 2009 13:26 Xusneb wrote:
This is the most confusing thread I've ever stumbled upon.
How the hell am I supposed to assign a percentage value (quantitative) to my confidence (qualitative)? "Um... yea, this range feels 90%." I cannot reconcile this!
Ideally the trends in our inability to do this will have meaning... but it's actually somewhat difficult to analyze this properly...
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I am 90% confident the OP is asian
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wow 40% of TL does not know how to read.
And no i am not overconfident.
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The goal of this test is to get exactly 9 out of 10 right. 10 shows you are underconfident in your abilities or know too much trivia for your own good, less than 9 means you are too confident in yourself. This is just a pride thing.
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thanks for sharing a well-known social psychology test so people start flaming
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On July 31 2009 15:13 iamke55 wrote:
The goal of this test is to get exactly 9 out of 10 right. 10 shows you are underconfident in your abilities or know too much trivia for your own good, less than 9 means you are too confident in yourself. This is just a pride thing.
Actually this is not entirely true, because even if you are somehow able to quantify exactly what '90% confidence' means into an estimate for lower and upper bounds, there's still a probability that you won't get 9 out of 10, even if your confidence-interval is exactly correct.
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On July 31 2009 18:33 Mista_Masta wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 15:13 iamke55 wrote:
The goal of this test is to get exactly 9 out of 10 right. 10 shows you are underconfident in your abilities or know too much trivia for your own good, less than 9 means you are too confident in yourself. This is just a pride thing. Actually this is not entirely true, because even if you are somehow able to quantify exactly what '90% confidence' means into an estimate for lower and upper bounds, there's still a probability that you won't get 9 out of 10, even if your confidence-interval is exactly correct.
You're right, the results of 10 such questions doesn't tell much unless someone got a significant number of questions wrong. There's no margin of error in this experiment at all when using 90% as 9 out of 10 instead of 900 out of 1000.
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There are actually 12 countries in OPEC ever since Indonesia left in 2008. So the guy who said he was 100% sure there were 13 is fooling himself.
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I don't even understand the interval thing.
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i dont get what im supposed to do? Can someone simplify the english a bit or give an example?
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Netherlands19135 Posts
Just the Boeing owned me
Long live NG and Discovery channels.
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Haha I think I learned the most about Moltke from this thread. I like how he stopped posting in it! Good decision.
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Oh yeah, 8 right. My intervals for the London to Tokyo distance just made it as well haha. How is a Boeing so heavy though, I didn't realize how heavy they can be....that and someone should give those elephants an award for carrying babies for that fucking long.
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On August 01 2009 04:31 Masamune wrote:
Oh yeah, 8 right. My intervals for the London to Tokyo distance just made it as well haha. How is a Boeing so heavy though, I didn't realize how heavy they can be....that and someone should give those elephants an award for carrying babies for that fucking long.
Yeah... Lets give elephants awards...
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On July 31 2009 16:42 intotherainx wrote:
thanks for sharing a well-known social psychology test so people stop flaming
Fixed.
And it should really be done in metric system. Seriously.
Regards,
Final_Judicator
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Hey azndsh, would you please add this (which I posted on page 3) to the OP please?
+ Show Spoiler [Metric Answers] +1.) 39 Years
2.) 6,738 km
3.) 13 Countries
4.) 39 Books
5.) 3,476 km
6.) 180,000 kg
7.) 1756
8.) 645 Days
9.) 9,590 km
10.) 11,033 m
Now nobody has to convert to English anymore!
+ Show Spoiler +And we can all quit whining!
+ Show Spoiler +On July 31 2009 00:55 nK)Duke wrote:
make this in the metric system and this test proves nothing but useless knowledge
+ Show Spoiler +On July 31 2009 03:20 Geo.Rion wrote:
And i had problems with counting in pounds, feets and miles, cuz around here everybody always uses kg, m, km and so on
+ Show Spoiler +On July 31 2009 04:16 bN` wrote:
Uh, reading is tech. I just looked at the questions and went wtf this is really hard. After figuring it out I got 7/10 inside the margin. Missed 6. 9. 2.. Metric system ftw :>
+ Show Spoiler +On July 31 2009 06:33 Mista_Masta wrote:
By the way, I was slightly annoyed that you asked for non-metric estimates, as that meant I had to convert my estimates to non-metric. Since I'm too lazy to get a calculator, this may have further influenced my amount of wrong estimates.
+ Show Spoiler +On August 02 2009 03:19 Final_Judicator wrote:
And it should really be done in metric system. Seriously.
Regards,
Final_Judicator
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Finally
Nice one, Johnny B.
Regards,
Final_Judicator
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If anyone got more than like 4 right without cheating that is absurd. Thos questions are so random. Might as well be asking what color shirt I am wearing. I would be guessing for every answer and there for be totally unconfident in my answers (why does FF think that is not a word?)
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if anything, this thread has proved that people are overconfident in their reading comprehension skills and/or ability to understand social experiments. but after all this is the internet, so I guess this is anything but surprising.
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On August 02 2009 06:38 azndsh wrote:
if anything, this thread has proved that people are overconfident in their reading comprehension skills and/or ability to understand social experiments. but after all this is the internet, so I guess this is anything but surprising. And when you came to that conclusion your own overconfidence blinded you from considering that maybe, just maybe... It is you who cannot understand how inefficient this experiment is for measuring confidence, and not the ones saying it's wrong.
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On August 02 2009 06:38 azndsh wrote:
if anything, this thread has proved that people are overconfident in their reading comprehension skills and/or ability to understand social experiments. but after all this is the internet, so I guess this is anything but surprising.
Thank god you wrote it for yourself and not them, or it might need to be revised.
It is a well-known fact in that people tend to think that they know more than they really do.
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On August 02 2009 06:58 VIB wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2009 06:38 azndsh wrote:
if anything, this thread has proved that people are overconfident in their reading comprehension skills and/or ability to understand social experiments. but after all this is the internet, so I guess this is anything but surprising. And when you came to that conclusion your own overconfidence blinded you from considering that maybe, just maybe... It is you who cannot understand how inefficient this experiment is for measuring confidence, and not the ones saying it's wrong.
on the contrary... people not being able to read correctly and this experiment being inefficient can both be true at the same time. maybe, just maybe... I do understand the inadequacies of asking people online to follow directions and evaluating themselves, but was nevertheless a little disappointed by how badly people misunderstood it and the number of smartass comments that followed.
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I'm talking about the many posts in this thread who did read and understand it and even then find it inefficient. Even ignoring miscommunication, this test cannot measure confidence. Too many variables are missing.
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On August 02 2009 07:04 azndsh wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2009 06:58 VIB wrote:On August 02 2009 06:38 azndsh wrote:
if anything, this thread has proved that people are overconfident in their reading comprehension skills and/or ability to understand social experiments. but after all this is the internet, so I guess this is anything but surprising. And when you came to that conclusion your own overconfidence blinded you from considering that maybe, just maybe... It is you who cannot understand how inefficient this experiment is for measuring confidence, and not the ones saying it's wrong. on the contrary... people not being able to read correctly and this experiment being inefficient can both be true at the same time. maybe, just maybe... I do understand the inadequacies of asking people online to follow directions and evaluating themselves, but was nevertheless a little disappointed by how badly people misunderstood it and the number of smartass comments that followed.
Well you did kind of sabotage yourself with that introduction. Stop blaming your test subjects.
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The point of this thread isn't for me to measure how "overconfident" TL is... it's to share with TL an interesting facet of human behavior and a simple way to demonstrate it. This test doesn't measure confidence so much as it reveals how people can make estimates that are far worse than what they think it is.
People claim that the answers were too surprising or irrelevant. It doesn't matter if people have no clue, they should factor that in when they're giving a 90% sure answer. In any case, it seems to me that lots of people make estimates about things that they don't know that much about.
Others claimed that it wasn't using the metric system. Well it's really not that hard to do some simple arithmetic and figure out your 90% confidence interval on what the conversion ratio actually is (or what your arithmetic ability is). That's part of the test as well.
For those who "got it", I can only hope that they were able to take away something from it. Simple as that.
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On August 02 2009 07:11 Chef wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2009 07:04 azndsh wrote:On August 02 2009 06:58 VIB wrote:On August 02 2009 06:38 azndsh wrote:
if anything, this thread has proved that people are overconfident in their reading comprehension skills and/or ability to understand social experiments. but after all this is the internet, so I guess this is anything but surprising. And when you came to that conclusion your own overconfidence blinded you from considering that maybe, just maybe... It is you who cannot understand how inefficient this experiment is for measuring confidence, and not the ones saying it's wrong. on the contrary... people not being able to read correctly and this experiment being inefficient can both be true at the same time. maybe, just maybe... I do understand the inadequacies of asking people online to follow directions and evaluating themselves, but was nevertheless a little disappointed by how badly people misunderstood it and the number of smartass comments that followed. Well you did kind of sabotage yourself with that introduction. Stop blaming your test subjects.
I said that
a) the OP was misunderstood a lot
b) it seems to me that this thread did, after all, show people are overconfident
can't really figure out the part where i'm blaming anything
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I didn't realize there were so many books in the old testament. O_O
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On August 02 2009 07:20 azndsh wrote:
The point of this thread isn't for me to measure how "overconfident" TL is... it's to share with TL an interesting facet of human behavior and a simple way to demonstrate it. But that's what I'm pointing out. You're not even demonstrating overconfidence. You're demonstrating something else and presenting it as a simple way to demonstrate overconfidence. That's what is "wrong" about it. You could have rolled a dice 10 times and told people you're demonstrating overconfidence. No, you're just demonstrating a dice rolling and presenting it as something else.
But if your goal was just to show people that apples exist by presenting them with oranges then you succeeded I guess.
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"overconfidence" is a psychology term. from wiki: The overconfidence effect is a bias in which people are correct in their judgments far less often than they think they are.
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On July 31 2009 00:58 Chill wrote:
This is stupid because the answers in themselves are shocking. Sure you should account for that in your interval, but the test is pitted against you. If they were questions with reasonable answers in everyday things this would hold a lot more weight for me.
That's basically what I was thinking. It's written better by Chill though, I couldn't figure out how to say it.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On August 02 2009 07:31 VIB wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2009 07:20 azndsh wrote:
The point of this thread isn't for me to measure how "overconfident" TL is... it's to share with TL an interesting facet of human behavior and a simple way to demonstrate it. But that's what I'm pointing out. You're not even demonstrating overconfidence. You're demonstrating something else and presenting it as a simple way to demonstrate overconfidence. That's what is "wrong" about it. You could have rolled a dice 10 times and told people you're demonstrating overconfidence. No, you're just demonstrating a dice rolling and presenting it as something else. But if your goal was just to show people that apples exist by presenting them with oranges then you succeeded I guess.
VIB, do you mind explaining what is wrong with the test. If possible, make a list, so that your points can be addressed one by one. Also, if possible, could you explain how the test works in a few words, just so that we are sure we're discussing the same test.
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bullshit on anyone answering all 10 correctly
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And another pseudo-intellectual thread on TL totally blows up.
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With how you phrased the task it seems like everyone would just put 0 - one trillion
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On August 03 2009 09:06 Kaysin wrote:
With how you phrased the task it seems like everyone would just put 0 - one trillion
No it doesn't. You would only answer this way if you didn't read the entire post, or if you don't understand what a 90% C.I. is.
You should select your ranges such that you think it is exactly 9 times more likely that the correct answer falls within your predicted range than outside of it.
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On August 03 2009 03:40 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2009 07:31 VIB wrote:On August 02 2009 07:20 azndsh wrote:
The point of this thread isn't for me to measure how "overconfident" TL is... it's to share with TL an interesting facet of human behavior and a simple way to demonstrate it. But that's what I'm pointing out. You're not even demonstrating overconfidence. You're demonstrating something else and presenting it as a simple way to demonstrate overconfidence. That's what is "wrong" about it. You could have rolled a dice 10 times and told people you're demonstrating overconfidence. No, you're just demonstrating a dice rolling and presenting it as something else. But if your goal was just to show people that apples exist by presenting them with oranges then you succeeded I guess. VIB, do you mind explaining what is wrong with the test. If possible, make a list, so that your points can be addressed one by one. Also, if possible, could you explain how the test works in a few words, just so that we are sure we're discussing the same test. I already posted it some pages ago, maybe you missed it. It's past bed time for me now so I'll just be lazy and copy/paste what I already posted:
+ Show Spoiler +On July 31 2009 06:48 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:36 VIB wrote:
I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬ If you didn't look at my profile, and I asked you to guess my age, but provide a minimum and maximum age, would you be able to come up with a range that you'd be 90% sure about? No I wouldn't, no human being possibly would. That is what you're missing. I have no way to calculate if I could be 90% sure of. There are many missing variables. I would have to guess what 90% is. And a guess is just that. A guess. Nothing else. You're trying to read too much into it. If you think you have any slightest idea of what the 90% of something you don't know is then you're over-confident already. And that I'm 100% sure of Roll a 6-sided dice 10 times and the chance of guessing it right 9 out of 10 times is still less than 1%. This is what the test is accomplishing. The only difference is that the dice size varies randomly from one person to another. I could tell you the results would be less than 1% before anyone did that test, it's not shocking nor surpring nor new nor important nor anything other than a bunch of people being unlucky.
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On July 31 2009 00:58 Chill wrote:
This is stupid because the answers in themselves are shocking. Sure you should account for that in your interval, but the test is pitted against you. If they were questions with reasonable answers in everyday things this would hold a lot more weight for me.
Which question, might I ask, had a shocking answer?
The elephant?
Large mammals have, as you might expect, longer gestation periods.
For example: a giraffe is 14 months...
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On August 02 2009 07:29 Mortality wrote:
I didn't realize there were so many books in the old testament. O_O
Lol god visits more frequently in the good ol days and each time he visits someone writes a book
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I am surprised so many people fail at this test, no feeling for percentages or probability?
I would be more likely to overestimate the intervals, but maybe having a scientific background changes my perception of numbers and possible errors.
P.S.: I don´t care for any excuses, use the metric system
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This test is actually quite interesting and revealing if you bother to understand what it's about. It requires the subject to understand what a 90% confidence interval is, which is already a pretty serious demand, and it requires the subject furthermore to think very carefully about his answers, because coming up with a satisfactory 90% confidence interval is a hell of a lot harder than just a plain "do you know the answer" question. So it's hard to get a decent sample of responses.
I tried this on my friend as well; I came up with 10 quantitative questions and researched the answers online, and gave him the questions after explaining the test. He got 6 out of 10 and his incorrect intervals were always barely too small, meaning that he's consistently a tiny bit overconfident. He then tested me in a similar way and I proved quite overconfident of my answers, despite knowing already that overconfidence was the general tendency.
Anyway, this was fun and educational so thanks for making this topic
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South Africa4316 Posts
Show nested quote +On July 31 2009 06:48 Daigomi wrote:On July 31 2009 06:36 VIB wrote:
I'm amazed at the amount of people taking this test seriously O.O
Oh less than 1% of the people cannot calculate precisely off the top of their head what 90% off something I don't know exactly is. That is sooo shocking. I definitely proved something new and important there. ¬¬ If you didn't look at my profile, and I asked you to guess my age, but provide a minimum and maximum age, would you be able to come up with a range that you'd be 90% sure about? No I wouldn't, no human being possibly would. That is what you're missing. I have no way to calculate if I could be 90% sure of. There are many missing variables. I would have to guess what 90% is. And a guess is just that. A guess. Nothing else. You're trying to read too much into it. If you think you have any slightest idea of what the 90% of something you don't know is then you're over-confident already. And that I'm 100% sure of Roll a 6-sided dice 10 times and the chance of guessing it right 9 out of 10 times is still less than 1%. This is what the test is accomplishing. The only difference is that the dice size varies randomly from one person to another. I could tell you the results would be less than 1% before anyone did that test, it's not shocking nor surpring nor new nor important nor anything other than a bunch of people being unlucky.
Well, I still fail to see your problem to be honest. If I asked you what your chances are of a rolling a 6 on a die roll, you would say 17% right? That's basically the same as saying that if you'd be willing to bet on 1:6 odds of rolling a six.
Now, if I asked you what Brazil's chances are of losing a football game against Japan, would you be willing to give me odds on that? Let's say I say it's 50:50, you would probably say those odds are way too high, it should be roughly 20:80, or maybe even 100, because you think that Brazil would draw or win 9 of the 10 matches they play against Japan. This test does exactly the same thing. It doesn't measure if you know the answer or not. It assumes that you don't know the answer, and then asks to you to give a range which you would be 90% sure that the answers falls into, or in other words, a range on which you would be willing to take a 9:1 bet that the answers falls inside of. For example, I have no idea how old you are, but I am willing to accept a 9:1 bet that the you are between 15 and 45 years old. I'm not necessarily going to be right, but I am 90% confident that I am right with that range.
The test is also not a measure of how good your ranges are. Some people are less confident and they choose huge ranges. Other people are more confident, and they choose small ranges. The point of the test is that when we say we are 90% sure of something, we tend to be wrong way more than 10% of the time. For example, if I had to guess the age of 10 people like you, and I chose a range of 18-30 that I feel 90% confident in (because they sound educated, so I assume they're at university, while at the same time, this is a SC forum so most people won't be too old) then I might get it right with you, and with 6 other guys, but get it wrong for 3 guys. What this means is that I was 20% too confident in my prediction, and I should have increased the range to 15-35, or 12-45.
Realise that in this situation there are thousands of variables missing. I don't know you, I don't know how you look, I don't know if you even come from Brazil. The only data I have is the way you chat on a forum. Using that data, I must then choose a range I'm confident in. 90% simply means 9 out of 10 times I should be right.
Also, even though the test is called a measure of overconfidence, it is rather an illustration that people are overconfident. It doesn't measure how much people are overconfident. What the purpose of the test really is, is to show that when people say they are 90% confident, they really should only be 50% confident, because they're wrong 50% of the time on things they are 90% confident about.
And just so that you know, the test was designed by Prof. Russo and Prof. Schoemaker. Russo is a prof at Cornell, and if I remember correctly, he did his BA in maths, his masters in statistics, and his PhD in cognitive psychology. Schoemaker did a BS in physics, then an masters in management, an MBA in finance, and a PhD in decision making. So with that in mind, I'm 90% (or at least 70%) confident that the people in this thread that say the test is useless are misunderstanding some part of it, rather than it being a mistake on the test's part. That's not to say that the test is flawless, I commented on a few of the problems with the test in a previous post. However, what I can say is that the test is a basic measure of what it intends to measure.
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Daigomi, try to notice the difference between your 2 first examples:
A)
On August 03 2009 18:10 Daigomi wrote:
If I asked you what your chances are of a rolling a 6 on a die roll, you would say 17% right? That's basically the same as saying that if you'd be willing to bet on 1:6 odds of rolling a six.
B)
On August 03 2009 18:10 Daigomi wrote:
Now, if I asked you what Brazil's chances are of losing a football game against Japan, would you be willing to give me odds on that?
[...]
I'm not necessarily going to be right, but I am 90% confident that I am right with that range. On A) you know the odds are beforehand. The dice has 6 sides, so betting on one is 1:6. That is an objective assumption. You calculated that, so you're safe. You can picture exactly in your head what 16.6% is. But on B), when you say "90% confident that I am right". Where does that number came from? You cannot calculate that what "90% confidence" is. You don't have the variables for that. So you guessed a range that gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside that sounds 90%'ish. If I asked you the same question at a different time. Depending on your mood, depending on what random memories are going through your head right now. Your guess could change. Asking you "what do you think my age is", right NOW you could give me a 15-35. But maybe tomorrow you'd guess 18-40, maybe after drinking coffee you would give me a 12-35. Maybe after remembering my last troll post on TL you'd give me a 10-30.
What I'm trying to say is. You don't know what 90% confidence is. You cannot give me a trustworthy safe data to work on my sampling if you don't know how to provide me such data.
To make this more clear let me try to give you a very over-exaggerated bad analogy:
- Assume a citizen that isn't either over or underconfident. He's a fair person, and theoretically a good "confidence test" should rate him us such. If this guy made the test you proposed, assuming the test is good. He should get 9 answers correct all the time.
- Ask this honest guy this question "Give me an interval that you are exactly 83.76% sure the winning number of Lottery #1 is. You don't know what ranges the lottery number are picked from." Ask this same question 10000 times for 10000 different lotteries, with 10000 different winning numbers.
- Assuming my theory is right and my test is good, this fellow citizen should get 8376 out of 10000 ranges correct.
- Now, do you really think he would get anywhere near 8376 answers correct regardless of how honest he his? If he misses by 20%, does that means he is 20% over/under-confident, or does it means he simply got unlucky guesses?
Of course this is a big exaggeration. But it shows you the two points where I disagree with the test's method. There are two axioms that you build at the start of the test that I disagree with:
1) The test subject can calculate off the top of his head what 90% of an unknown value is.
2) The test subject can provide a reliable confidence range off the top of his head to an unknown answer.
You cannot prove the above two mathematically. You don't have the variables for that. Those are axioms your test is assuming from the start. If those are true then the test is valid. But I don't honestly agree too much with those. On the standard scientific method you build your axioms -> calculate a theory based on those axioms -> create a test to try the theory -> test the theory. If the test fails the intended results = the theory is invalid. But if the test matches the theory, then it doesn't mean the theory is necessarily right. Instead, it could mean two things: 1) The theory is right for all possible tests or 2) The theory is only right for that test, but could fail other tests, so it's globally invalid. You will consider 1) to be correct for practical uses until someone comes up with a different test that disproves your theory.
In this case. The theory passed the test. If the theory is right, then a very low number of people should get 9/10 answers correct, and according to the OP, only 1% did. But that doesn't mean the test is correct. I'm pretty sure that if you had asked the test subjects to roll a dice of a random size 10 times instead of asking those 10 questions. The results would be very similar. Does that mean rollings a dice is effectively measuring how confident one can be? I think not.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that if you repeated the same test with the same person, but with completely different questions, at completely different days and times. The results from the first and the test would vary a lot more often then not. That would objectively disprove the test, I think
Now about the authors' credibility. I'm gonna say something is not completely relevant to what we're talking. But it's so funny that I'm gonna post it anyway:+ Show Spoiler +
On August 03 2009 18:10 Daigomi wrote:And just so that you know, the test was designed by Prof. Russo and Prof. Schoemaker. Russo is a prof at Cornell, and if I remember correctly, he did his BA in maths, his masters in statistics, and his PhD in cognitive psychology. Schoemaker did a BS in physics, then an masters in management, an MBA in finance, and a PhD in decision making.
I've had this professor some years ago who was a phd in statistics. He was pretty well known around here because of his veeeery unconventional style and his. He often bragged about all his awards on mathematics "contests" and "olympic tests" (not sure how those are called in english) and how he could solve any complex trigonometry problem using only Tales and Pythagoras. So anyway, we happen to have heard many that he used to have serious money problems because of gambling. But for someone who is phd is fucking statistics that sounded more like gossips. Until one day, during class he was trying to prove that the odds of a specific sequence to happen was so rare. That he pulled a dice he had in his pocket, asked a girl in the front row to roll the dice x times and said that if numbers matched such sequence he would he would approve everyone in the final exams. Well, the girl rolled the dices, got the numbers correct and now he is all desperate begging us not to tell this to anyone because he could get fired and all and how he needed money because he lost so much to gambling already lol And that's how I passed in statistics Not trying to imply anything about the authors of the test. I don't know them. Just saying you should always be skeptical about anyone
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South Africa4316 Posts
I'm not necessarily going to be right, but I am 90% confident that I am right with that range. On A) you know the odds are beforehand. The dice has 6 sides, so betting on one is 1:6. That is an objective assumption. You calculated that, so you're safe. You can picture exactly in your head what 16.6% is. But on B), when you say "90% confident that I am right". Where does that number came from? You cannot calculate that what "90% confidence" is. You don't have the variables for that. So you guessed a range that gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside that sounds 90%'ish.[/quote]
I get what you are saying here, but it doesn't really make sense. 90% confidence means I am willing to accept a 9:1 bet on it. The whole point of the exercise is to show that when people are willing to accept 90% bets, they should only accept 70% or 50% bets. Now, you can say that individuals change on a day to day basis, so one day they will be perfectly right, while the next day they will get everything wrong, and that might be true. But the fact is though, that this test is measured over thousands of people, and randomization will remove individual differences. So in your highly exaggerated example, the guy with the perfect understanding won't get 8376 answers right, it's called a standard deviation, but if you had thousands of people like him, then their mean should be fairly close to 8376. Furthermore, the point of this test is not to show that some people have a 70% confidence interval, while others have a 40% confidence interval. It is to show that people who should get 8376 questions right tend to get 3000 questions right, or people who should get 9 questions right, tend to get 3-7 questions right.
Of course this is a big exaggeration. But it shows you the two points where I disagree with the test's method. There are two axioms that you build at the start of the test that I disagree with:
1) The test subject can calculate off the top of his head what 90% of an unknown value is.
2) The test subject can provide a reliable confidence range off the top of his head to an unknown answer.
I think you can discard the unknown part of both those questions, as it is irrelevant. Firstly, none of those values are provided to you in a void. All of them you have some knowledge about, so you have a starting point. When did MLK die? Most people die between the ages of 0-110, so you know where to start. From there you can estimate how old he was when he was still alive... at least 25. And from there you can decide on what number you would be willing to take for the upperlimit so that you would accept a 9:1 bet on the range. Secondly, and more importantly, not having knowledge about it shouldn't matter, as the point of the exercise is to choose a limit at which you are confident that you will be right, so even if you have no knowledge of the answer, you should still be able to choose a limit at which you are confident that you are right. For example, I have no idea what the shortest distance from Earth to the next galaxy is, in fact, I don't even have a starting point. Yet I can still say that I am 90% confident that the distance to the next galaxy is between 10 light years and 10,000,000,000 light years away. I didn't just type a big number out now either, I feel that, based on no information whatsoever, that the next galaxy should not be more than ten billion light years away. Even if I get asked 10 questions like that, of which I have no knowledge, I should be able to provide intervals with which I feel confident.
The problem with questions like that is obviously, that people might vastly underestimate or overestimate the phenomenon if they have no basis of knowledge, which is why they give us questions which we know a little bit about. We know how old most people get, we have seen photos of MLK, so we have a basis for our estimates. With the elephant question, we know how long humans give birth, so we use that as our basis. It is unlikely that anyone will say 300 years, or 2 days, for that question, becuase they have a basic estimate. So people aren't likely to completely get the ball park wrong. So I think that you can leave the unknown quantity out of your axions, as firstly, it should not be relevant, and secondly, the questions are designed so that people are not without any knowledge.
That leaves us with two axions:
The test subject can calculate what 90% is.
The test subject can provide a reliable confidence range
I think we can both agree that everyone knows what 90% is theoretically (9 times out of 10). If they don't know what it is practically, then that's what the test is trying to show. This is not a general test of overconfidence, its a test of decision making overconfidence, and if people theoretically know what 90% confidence is, but they can't apply that practically, then it shows that people give 90% values to decisions in real life that should not get them - exactly what this test is trying to prove.
The second axion has two elements to it, that participants know what a confidence range is, and that they can provide a reliable confidence range. I think confidence range is explained reasonably well (for those that can and do read) in the test itself, and in practical applications of this test, it was likely to be explained again. So, can people provide a reliable answer? You seem to imply that people can't, that people choose figures just out of the blue. Here's an example: The computer you are using now is probably not brand new, so how much would I need to pay you for it? $2,000? How about tomorrow, nothing has changed except the memories in your head and your breakfast. $1,500 now? Then tomorrow you have a bad day, $4,000 right? People don't work like that. Yes, values might change. On a good day you might ask me $1,900 for it, and on a bad day you might ask me $2,100 for it. But that doesn't mean that you do not make a logical, systematic decision.
Furthermore, the test is averaged over lots of people, as said earlier, so individual differences shouldn't have an impact. The only way in which individual differences can be threat to validity is if it changes systematically for the participants, for example, if this test was done at a school on the day after prom, then the elation of the night before might make people be more optimistic than normal, leading to more overconfidence. However, if this test is done in a normal situation, then the ratio of positive vs. negative people should be the same as usual.
Yes, reliability won't be perfect, and yes, you're not unequivocally proving that people tend to be overconfident in their decisions, and some people will get different results based on situational factors. That's part of all research in the social sciences. That's why we don't work with causal factors, we work with correlations.
In this case. The theory passed the test. If the theory is right, then a very low number of people should get 9/10 answers correct, and according to the OP, only 1% did. But that doesn't mean the test is correct. I'm pretty sure that if you had asked the test subjects to roll a dice of a random size 10 times instead of asking those 10 questions. The results would be very similar. Does that mean rollings a dice is effectively measuring how confident one can be? I think not.
You have to actually substantiate what you think could be confounding the variables. The test says "choose a range with which you are 90% confident" and then finds that most people get the answer right only 50% of the time. It specifically asks them to give their confidence level, and then it proves that their confidence is unfounded. I do not not see how this is comparable to the results of rolling a die.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that if you repeated the same test with the same person, but with completely different questions, at completely different days and times. The results from the first and the test would vary a lot more often then not. That would objectively disprove the test, I think
All that would prove is that the test has high variance or low reliability. ("The reliability of a measurement procedure is the stability or consistency of a measurement. If the same individuals are measured under the same conditions, a reliable measurement procedure will produce identical (or nearly identical) measurements."). This would be relevant if confidence was relatively fixed, like IQ. You can't have an IQ test says that a person has a 150 IQ on day 1, and a 80 IQ on day 2. However, do people's confidence levels change depending on the day? If yes, then reliability isn't important to the test, and is expected to vary. As mentioned earlier, the only risk then would be a systematic variance in confidence levels.
Now about the authors' credibility. I'm gonna say something is not completely relevant to what we're talking. But it's so funny that I'm gonna post it anyway: + Show Spoiler +
On August 03 2009 18:10 Daigomi wrote:And just so that you know, the test was designed by Prof. Russo and Prof. Schoemaker. Russo is a prof at Cornell, and if I remember correctly, he did his BA in maths, his masters in statistics, and his PhD in cognitive psychology. Schoemaker did a BS in physics, then an masters in management, an MBA in finance, and a PhD in decision making.
I've had this professor some years ago who was a phd in statistics. He was pretty well known around here because of his veeeery unconventional style and his. He often bragged about all his awards on mathematics "contests" and "olympic tests" (not sure how those are called in english) and how he could solve any complex trigonometry problem using only Tales and Pythagoras. So anyway, we happen to have heard many that he used to have serious money problems because of gambling. But for someone who is phd is fucking statistics that sounded more like gossips. Until one day, during class he was trying to prove that the odds of a specific sequence to happen was so rare. That he pulled a dice he had in his pocket, asked a girl in the front row to roll the dice x times and said that if numbers matched such sequence he would he would approve everyone in the final exams. Well, the girl rolled the dices, got the numbers correct and now he is all desperate begging us not to tell this to anyone because he could get fired and all and how he needed money because he lost so much to gambling already lol And that's how I passed in statistics Not trying to imply anything about the authors of the test. I don't know them. Just saying you should always be skeptical about anyone
I don't really get the point of the example you give. Are you implying that he wasn't good at stats because he couldn't gamble? I've got a stunning handwriting, it doesn't mean I can write novels. Or are you implying that intelligent people also make mistakes? Because from your example, it doesn't seem like he made a mistake, he just had terrible luck. If the sequence was really rare (lets say four six roles in a row), then what he did with your class would have worked for 1295 other classes.
I've got endless respect for professors, as I think does anyone studying post-grad. That doesn't mean they are never wrong, not at all, but it does mean that compared to a lay-person, and on their topic of specialization, they are basically never wrong. Getting a PhD in psychology is 8-10 years of studying, of which half of it is focused on your specialisation. To become a professor changes from uni to uni, but one of the general conditions is that you need to publish a set amount of articles (like 6) in scientific journals every year. What that means is that the people that designed this test studied for a combined total of roughly 20 years, with half of it focusing on this topic, and that they designed an average of six experiments per year, experiments that were accepted through peer review by equally knowledgeable people. What this means to me is that they probably know how to set up valid experiments in their field of specialisation, and that your arguments are more likely to come from a misunderstanding of the experiment than it is to come from them completely screwing up the experiment.
I don't mean that to sound harsh, and I'm not saying that because you didn't study in the direction, your opinions should be ignored. That's why I touched on everything you said. What I am saying is that you should consider how confident you are that you are right here, and then consider the odds of you being right, and see if the two are the same :p
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Man.. I'm the stereotypical ignorant American. But I'm asian. D:
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EPT
