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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   623 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

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 borderline braindead from Rogan. It's like a child's thoughtless, blurted out estimate.

On the other end of that topic's estimates, you had the Palestininans in a Gaza survey, most of whom were convinced that only 0.5 million Jews lived in Israel. Their ignorance may have played a part in their constant willingness to use violence against Israel. It also may have some root in what may be universal breeding grounds for genocidal thought (my own speculation): "they're super dangerous and evil, but they're super small at the same time, so we should just squash them!"

My q: How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years? Guess at a percentage/range.

I don't think it's brain dead, it just means he doesn't have a reference point to compare to. @Corvos mentioned that would be 1/8 of all people on earth, but if you don't know there are 8 billion people on earth (I certainly didn't), then that doesn't help you as a heuristic. If you don't happen to know any reference point on which to base an estimate, and if you're being asked in a setting where you have to answer off the cuff (which he was, since it was on his show), then your answer isn't going to really have any bearing on how smart (or not) you are.

Yeah, reference points are hard. I once lost a general knowledge quiz for my team by getting us to the tiebreak and then being asked, “What is the distance between London and the closest point in Canada?”

I thought for a bit, tried to imagine them on a map relative to a journey in the UK I knew and thought, hmm, easily ten times that.

Said, “1200 miles”.

Teammates not best pleased.

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