[singleshot_]

I’ll simplify for manhattan and extrapolate for the four outer boroughs. Ten avenues, a hundred streets. A thousand blocks? One cab per block? One thousand cabs in manhattan? 5,000 total?

There are about 13,500 taxi medallions.

[saghm]

That sort of estimation feels a lot easier to me than the "golf balls in a baseball stadium one" that was mentioned by the parent because it's dealing with quantities I can recall having heard before like "how many streets are there in Manhattan" rather than measurements that personally would never stick in my head like "how wide is a golf ball". I'm not sure why, but I've always been awful at making even rough estimates of units. If you gave me the diameter of a golf ball and the dimensions of the stadium, I could do some basic calculations, but even though I physically know about how large a golf ball is, I couldn't tell you whether it's more likely that its diameter is 0.5 or 1.5" (and not having looked it up, I would believe you if you told me it wasn't even within that range)! This gets worse with units I can't visualize (like weight), and when the sizes get larger than I can easy relate to; if you asked me questions like how much a car weighs or how long the Brooklyn Bridge is, I'm doubtful I'd even be within a factor of 2 more often than not.

I'm probably taking this more seriously than it was intended above, but the idea that this is some sort of proxy for "thinking" or "intelligence" feels off to me; doing the math given the size of something might be thinking or intelligence, but knowing roughly "how big" something is seems more like intuition.

[stavros]

I kind of figure a centimeter is about the width of a pinky, then I try to gauge how many pinkies fit in some distance, and go by that. I'd imagine a golf ball is about 4cm in diameter, though I haven't seen one in years.

[saghm]

Yeah, I don't feel confident in the idea that my pinky is around 1/4 of a golf ball. It could be 1/6, or 1/2, or nowhere close to either. A lot of this seems to be an exercise in how confident someone is about arbitrary guesses, and it seems weird to me that a higher willingness to make assumptions is somehow correlated with raw intellect. If someone wants me to do the math with a completely made up number, I can do that, but at that point it seems like the true test is figuring out whether the person asking the question actually cares about the accuracy of the answer or not, and that seems more about the social aspect of an interview. That isn't to say that what it's measuring isn't useful, but I think as someone on the spectrum, it's hard for me not to have a strong reaction to the idea that it's purely a measure of intelligence.

[stavros]

I get it, but it looks like a golf ball is 4.3cm, so I was pretty close for it to be that arbitrary.

[darkerside]

Maybe take something small you do know the size of and estimate how many golf balls fit into that