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Hardly completely useless. Knowing the rough width of the US will augment your ability to make all sorts of potentially useful heuristic judgments about distances, times, areas, and speeds both within and beyond the US. For example, if you know (or ever learn) the duration of a flight from New York to LA, and you know the rough width of the US, then you can make an OoM estimate of the speed of a jet airliner, which could allow you to estimate other flight times for known distances.
Someone may say that they can Google this stuff if you ever need to know it, but that presumes that you’ll always know when it’s a good time to seek it out, and that’s not always the case. More to the point, inert information on Google can’t help build good epistemic filters, nor can it contribute to creative problem-solving. Knowledge of a broad set of useful facts is very important, and should be a lifelong endeavour for those who want to get the most out of their intelligence.
You've just proved my point. The example you give of a useful scenario is something which would never, ever be useful to me. I stand by my statement that this is a useless fact.
Your insistence that being able to better estimate speeds,distances and times being "useless" reads more as arrogance than sincere disinterest. Because its not really asking much from you, we ask middle schoolers to do this all the time.
Not to mention being able to accurately estimate those things transfer over to estimating money, timescales, populations, etc. A very valuable skill in making sense of the vast amount of numbers all around you and having a well calibrated bullshit detector.
The alternative is literally memorising things that are "useful". Books can be written on why that is stupid.
In fact I would say the whole covid restrictions fiasco was a result of the masses having bad meta-estimation intuition. They got spooked by arbitrarily large numbers of people dying, with no context to what level of death is acceptable or how much death (or lost life years) is caused by lockdowns and money printing.
I never said estimating distances is useless. I said that estimating the distance of the entire country is useless. In 37 years I have never once needed to know that, and I would bet good money that I never will.
So estimating distances in the abstract is not useless but estimating the distance of the US is? I don't understand how this is contradictory. If you know how to estimate distances, you can estimate the distances of anything to anything else.
The base-level skill is what is being discussed, not a gameified application of that skill. "Estimating the distance of the US from coast to coast" is not the skill, estimating distances is.
No, what is discussed is very specifically the width of the US, and whether it's useful to know that. This is not an abstract discussion about estimating distances in general.
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