Ailan Chubb wrote:
>
> In the Oct. 9, 2000 New Yorker (p. 33), James Surowiecki wrote of an "old
> B-school stunt, in which a professor presents his students with a jar full
> of jelly beans and asks them to guess how many there are. Their answers are
> always wildly inaccurate, but the average of those guesses--the class's
> collective guess-- is invariably within three per cent of the correct
> number."
I could be wrong, but this sounds to me like a factoid. Among other
things, I would expect - based on our numerical system and other things
- that people would be likely to over- or under-estimate by similar
*proprtions*, giving a logsymmetric distribution whose arithmetic mean
would only by the greatest coincidence correspond to anything.
I wouldn't like to say that this couldn't be demonstrated - a quick
perusal of the mentalism and card trick sections of a good conjuring
book suggest various ways that an audience (answering aloud) could be
nudged into calling mostly the right answer (known to the professor) but
I sincerely doubt that such matters as the optical effect of the
thickness of the jar (a thick-walled jar appears to have a larger cavity
than it actually has) could be judged to within 3% by such methods.
-Robert Dawson
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