Estimates Game
Introduction
Are you over- or under-confident in your own knowledge? Find out: est.alejo.ch
Playing
Each game consits of ten questions comparing two events. For each question:
- Click the text to sort (flip) the events: leave the earlier event first. Don’t research while playing! Rather, answer from the knowledge you had at the start.
- Indicate your confidence in the answer (from 50% to 100%). At 50%, the question is skipped. I recommend avoiding 50% unless you really have no idea.
When you’re done, click Finish.
Score
You’ll see the number (and set) of correct answers and, more importantly, the distribution of probabilities of correct answers (based on your confidence scores). If your confidence scores are perfect predictors for the probability that your answer is correct, what is the probability of each possible outcome (such as “4 answers were correct”)?
Your main goal is not to get all questions right; that’s hard. Your goal is, instead, to get your confidence values right. Did you get as many questions right as predicted by your confidence values?
With relatively few answers (e.g., playing just once or twice), randomness plays a role —maybe your confidence scores are perfect, you’re just unlucky. The game keeps a tally of all games (click “History” and scroll to “Total” at the bottom); play a few games to reduce the effect of luck (hooray law of big numbers) and get a good sense of your actual performance.
Background
Estimates Game is fully contained in your browser (has no server-side logic), storing the game log with the localStorage API.
This was inspired by a few “manual” exercises I did with my engineering team at Google based on ideas from Douglas Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything.