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Notes -
CNBC is reporting that
Notably
The USA's GDP is $20 trillion, so a cost of $220 billion is about 1% of the USA's GDP, which should immediately raise some red flags. Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup.
Unsurprisingly, we can count on Reuters to set the record straight.
Some Googling also gets us news.sky.com being more explicit
I think it's fair to say that reporting all infrastructure spending in the last decade as "spending on the World Cup infrastructure" is pants-on-fire misleading, particularly when comparing it to the costs other countries paid.
The New York Times does it with a bit more plausible deniability.
Although their tweet is more suspect
But what about that $45 billion stadium (which, incidentally, is greater than Qatar's annual government spending)?
That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000) and cost $2.3 billion (or 5% the alleged cost of Lusail). Also sportingnews.com, while also guilty of running that $220 billion number, helpfully lists the costs of each of the new stadiums and claims Lusail Stadium cost $767 million.
Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide). You should know if the government spends $1 billion or $50 million on something. Reporting that a country spent $200 billion on a sporting event instantly raise a red flag.
Go play Wits & Wagers.
Just to pick up on one aspect of this, I completely agree about the importance of having decent Fermi estimation skills, and it’s something you can definitely train. I’m continually amazed at how many people don’t have basic frames of reference for things like populations, money, timescales, distances, etc..
I remember hearing a prominent philosophy academic once say in a talk that “octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago”. I assumed it was a slip of the tongue, but then she gave the same talk a month later and made exactly the same mistake. I assume she read “500 million” somewhere and it got transmuted to “500 billion” in her head, but jeez, you should be instinctively sanity-checking and filtering that stuff in your head (“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”).
In the interests of fun, here’s one of my favourite (paired sets of) Fermi questions for the sub.
(1) Imagine our sun as the size of a baseball located in New York. Mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) be?
Answer: about 2000km (approximately the distance from NYC to Oklahoma City).
Reasoning: Proxima Centauri is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. Our sun is 1,392,700 km in diameter, so it would take approximately 28 million suns in a line to reach to Proxima Centauri. A baseball is approximately 7cm in diameter, and 28 million baseballs would stretch approximately 2000 km.
(2) Imagine our galaxy as the size of a dinner plate (again let’s say in NYC). Again mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) be?
Answer: about 7.5 metres away!
**Reasoning: the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light years away, so it would take 25 Milky Ways stacked end to end to reach it. A large dinner plate is approximately 30cm in diameter, so 25 of them stacked end to end would extend 7.5m.
My surprised upshot:compared to interstellar distances, galaxies are unbelievably close to each other!
I'm going to type out my unfiltered thoughtprocess. And not use a calculator or spend more than 30 seconds per problem because that would be against the Spirit of Fermi estimation.
I know that the sun is 150*10^6 km away and the nearest start is 4 lightyears away. So it would be cheating.
But fuck that, I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.
So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.
Wild out of my ass guess would be the ball is outside the atmosphere of earth.
Revelation: Annnddd I was wayyy off. By an order of magnitude.
I know Andromeda is 2*10^6 light years away.
Repeat the same process as before.
Revelation: Wild overestimate again. Off by many orders of magnitude.
I need to get better at intuiting ratios.
Also, a persons Fermi estimating abilities are a very good indicator of how much they read as a child. Serious.
Many of the intuitions such as astronomic distances, evolutionary timelines, depth of natural features like the oceans are things I learned straight out of my middle school textbooks or Children's encyclopedias.
Sounds like you are treating the baseball as the size of the earth's orbit around the sun, rather than the size of the sun itself. But that would give you an answer that's too small rather than too big so idk how you got your answer.
I am confused about your reasoning here...are you calculating (4 years / 8 minutes) * (radius of baseball / radius of sun)? That would give you a unitless value, not a distance. I think you were using the wrong values in your calculation but I can't tell what you were using.
You are right, I goofed by taking the distance from earth to the sun instead of the size of the sun. The answers being even remotely a few orders of magnitude away is a coincidence.
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I feel like the magnitudes involved in interstellar and intergalactic distances are so vast that it's not really a mark against your intuition that you find it difficult to wrap your head around. For everyone that isn't an astronomer it's really just trivia anyway.
Whereas people work with and talk about money all the time, so I think people should be expected to have better intuition in that regard.
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