[dthunt]

Yeah, this is a fair criticism. There are explicit bounds encoded in each problem and when those conflict with your estimates, you will be frustrated.

Haven't got a frigging clue isn't a fair thing to say though. The whole point of the exercise is that most people have a significant misalignment going on between their modelling of reality and the track record of their modelling ability.

Exercises like figuring out how much milk a cow produces in a week or how fast a horse runs require you to consider what information you DO have suggests about upper and lower bounds and things like that, and then correctly realizing the confidence of your models is the other half of the equation.

You are pretty sure, I would imagine, that a cow doesn't produce 10,000 gallons of milk in a week. You are pretty sure that a 'heavy' user of a vending machine might use three a day and buy a bunch of snacks and a drink or two, and that 'heavy' users maximally represent Y% of the population, with high confidence.

You can use these intuitions to guide your estimates, and you do in fact do so on a regular basis. The exercise is calibrating those estimates against their empirical accuracy.

[Mithaldu]

The point here is: The website asked me about my beliefs. It did NOT ask me to work out the correct solution. And if i believe i cannot possibly give a useful estimate then that should be a viable answer i can give.

Your example is especially relevant since i don't even know what a gallon is. I guess it's maybe a liter or something? Who knows. Either way: Without actual research there is no more accurate modelling of my belief than "i don't know", period.