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By Thoreau
Today I was right to be wrong and those who were right were wrong to be right. At a meeting of local physicists, they held an “order of magnitude estimate” contest. The winner of the contest is the person with the median guess, not the guess closest to the right answer. This is in part as a test to see if the crowd is right, i.e. is the median close? And in part it’s because for some of these questions we don’t necessarily know the right answer.
Well, my answer was off by 2 orders of magnitude, but I tied for median. (There was an even number of people at the event.) I won a $50 Vernier gift certificate. Being rewarded for wrong answers just shows that I was right to be wrong.
The question was “How many sheets of paper would it take to cover your share of the earth’s surface?” The contest organizer divided the earth’s area by 6 billion and calculated that it would take about 1 million sheets of 8/12×11 paper to cover that. I had meant to sit down and work it out, but I was in a rush, so I just tallied it in my head, got some stuff wrong, and came up with 10,000. The other guy came up with 100,000.
Anyway, my answer is far more interesting than the answer by the contest organizer. You can’t learn anything from that guy, but you can learn a lot from me.
Comment by Rob —
March 30, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
Yes but did your wrong decision lead to lots of people ending up dead, displaced, or just in a terrible condition? I mean sure you were wrong but you weren’t wrong in an interesting way with terrible consequences. So while war supporters soon to be joined with hedge fund managers and investment bankers are allowed to navel gaze while Rome burns, you sir just didn’t hurt enough people.
Comment by Kip W —
March 30, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
Well, Rob, what do you expect for a lousy $50? Give him a trillion to spend, and he could probably put in a respectable enough showing. For somebody who’s saddled with a working conscience, I mean.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 30, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
For a larger fee I could probably fuck up the design of some sort of technology and cause a bunch of deaths as a result.
If I do that, I want a gig as an Atlantic writer.
Comment by monkey.dave —
March 30, 2008 @ 9:16 pm
The guy who came up with the right answer probably goes to a church with an Angry Black Man as the preacher, so you know that he hates America and be safely ignored.