Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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One Billion Jews
Recently, Gad Saad was on the Joe Rogan Experience and he asked the host how many Jews he thought there were. Rogan responded one billion, or 500 million minimum, conservative estimate. There are in fact about 20 million Jews. Rogan was off by a factor of 25.
Ha ha. But to be fair if you're not used to doing Fermi estimates you can get tripped up like this.
I asked Claude to challenge me on some that I might be similarly dumb about but I've spent enough time in this kind of community that all of the low hanging fruit, like murder rate in the US or percentage of federal budget that goes to foreign aid has been picked.
The ones that busted me hardest were estimating the age of Proto Indo European (less than 10,000 years old, I guessed 100k ) and the number of spoken languages in the world (about 7000, I guessed 1000 ). I guess I don't feel too embarrassed about not knowing those. And I still wasn't 25x off.
I ask you, fellow Mottizens, do you have facts that we should all know that would probably punk us if we tried to estimate? Tip: you can make something a spoiler by surrounding it with two | characters on each side (check the preview).
That's a very common thing - people routinely vastly overestimate minorities and underestimate majorities: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
Though a billion Jews is obviously weird - like ok, there are a billion Jews - where do they actually live? There are only two billion-sized countries, and neither of them has any noticeable number of Jews.
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