Comments on: How Good Are You at Estimating?

By: Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz: Bees can Count « 360

Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz: Bees can Count « 360 — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:23:34 +0000

[...] Incidentally, a different news story in The Telegraph earlier this year announced that North American mosquito fish can also count to four. The fish could also distinguish between groups of very different sizes (16 versus 8, but not 16 versus 12). No word on how bees would do at the dots test. [...]

By: Batman

Batman — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:50:29 +0000

My mistakes were clumped, too. I started out 22/22, then got one really wrong (8 yellow, 17 blue – I guessed yellow). Then I got 2 out of the next 3 wrong, as well. Then another good stretch, then a bad run. Finished with 94%.

By: jd2718

jd2718 — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:19:38 +0000

Trainable. Started with 4 in a row wrong, then went 44/51. The other mistakes were also clumped.

Jonathan

By: mathmom

mathmom — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:42:30 +0000

I got 90% over 30 tests as well. Since I’m a mathie I guess I represent a positive datapoint for their hypothesis.

By: mbork

mbork — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:26:12 +0000

Wow! Got 90% on 30 tests, and after 30 more got 88% (in overall 60 tests). And defended my PhD in maths this year;), so probably the correlation is rather positive for me;).

And a word of advice: don’t worry if you’re below 75% (neither be too happy if you are over it;)). “Mean” usually means that some are better and some worse; what’s more, “positive correlation” does not mean “if you score 50%, forget about studying maths” – it means only that, e.g., for a random sample of 100 people scoring 50%, it is rather not very probable that 95% of them are math professors – but still, 5% might be;). By analogy, scoring 95% does not mean you don’t have to learn for math test;).