Quotes About Estimation

Any project can be estimated accurately (once it's completed).

When I go to the beauty parlor, I always use the emergency entrance. Sometimes I just go for an estimate.

You can never tell what ships are worth.

Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.

statistician David Spiegelhalter has puzzled on the numbers that describe our sexual lives, and estimates that something like 900,000,000 acts of heterosexual intercourse take place per year in Britain alone, or roughly 100,000 per hour. If we extrapolate that to the seven billion humans alive, it works out at around 166,667 every minute.

We estimate that humanitarian agencies have access to about 350,000 vulnerable people in Darfur - only about one third of the estimated total population in need.

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.

I am convinced, in the words of C. S. Lewis—who in my estimation is probably the greatest Christian apologist in recent memory—that the question of being an apologist is not so much whether you use an apologetic in answering someone's question, but whether the apologetic you already use is a good one.

It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another. -- Malcolm Reynolds

From his naval training he recalled someone giving him a rule of thumb about estimating the speed of a vessel based on its bow wake. The

Their conscious selves expected diminishing returns. The average estimate of new endings was about five, which was fewer than they had produced in the initial four minutes. They were then given an additional four minutes to work. The actual number of new endings they generated was 20 percent higher than they estimated. They didn't give persistence enough credit.

However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.

Overconfidence is another manifestation of WYSIATI: when we estimate a quantity, we rely on information that comes to mind and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind—perhaps because one never knew it—is impossible.

The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.

The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor.

If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.

planning fallacy

Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence

anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity

Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA.

Regla del pico final: la estimación en retrospectiva global estaba bien predicha por el valor medio del nivel de dolor manifestado en el peor momento de la experiencia y al terminar esta. • Olvido de la duración: la duración del procedimiento no tuvo efecto alguno sobre las estimaciones del dolor total.

shed new light on the planning fallacy

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally "moving" from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.