2025-11-22

Last modified: 2025-11-22 16:22:10

Calibration practice

I'm reading "The Scout Mindset" by Julia Galef at the moment and there is a section on "calibration practice", a series of true/false questions where you have to indicate not only the answer you believe to be true, but also your confidence level, to see how well-calibrated you are.

She suggests circling the options on the page but I don't have a pencil to hand and don't want to mark the book so I'm going to write them here.

Animal facts:

1. The elephant is the world's largest mammal. I think false and 75%, aren't blue whales technically mammals or have I got that wrong? [Correct]
2. Sea otters sometimes hold hands while they sleep. I think true and 95%, I'm sure I've heard this before but maybe it's just folklore. [Correct]
3. Centipedes have more legs than any other animal. I think false and 85%, what about millipedes? [Correct]
4. Mammals and dinosaurs coexisted. I think probably true and 75%. [Correct]
5. Bears can't climb trees. I think some of them can? Aren't koalas are a type of bear. So true and 95%. [Incorrect! I got the right answer but mentally inverted the question, annoying]
6. Camels store water in their humps. I think they actually store fat, so false and 85%. [Correct]
7. Flamingos are pink because they eat shrimp. I think this might actually be true but 65%. [Correct]
8. The giant panda eats mostly bamboo. I know bamboos eat shoots and leaves. Shoots and leaves of bamboo? Probably true, 65%. [Correct]
9. The platypus is the only mammal that lays eggs. Seems true, 55%. [Incorrect! Echidnas are also egg-laying mammals]
10. A mule is a cross between a male donkey and a female horse. No way to know if that is the right way around, I'd go 50% but let's say false and 55% since 50% isn't an option. [Incorrect]

Who was born first?

11. Julius Caesar or Confucius? 65%. [Incorrect]
12. Fidel Castro or Mahatma Gandhi? 55%. [Correct]
13. Nelson Mandela or Anne Frank? 95%. On the basis that I think Nelson Mandela was in his 80s around 2000, which means born around 1920, and Anne Frank was a child in WW2. [Incorrect! Again I got the right answer but mentally inverted the question somehow]
14. Cleopatra or Muhammad? 55%. If Muhammad is the same as Jesus then I think they were both around 0 AD so no idea which was earlier. [Correct]
15. William Shakespeare or Joan of Arc? 55%. [Correct]
16. George Washington or Sun Tzu? 85%, surely Sun Tzu is from the ancient world? [Correct]
17. Genghis Khan or Leonardo da Vinci? 75%. Pretty sure the Genghis Khan stuff was around 1000 AD and Leonardo da Vinci more like 1500 AD. [Correct]
18. Queen Victoria or Karl Marx? 95%. Queen Victoria was in the 1800s and Karl Marx is 1900s. [Incorrect]
19. Saddam Hussein or Marilyn Monroe? 65%. [Incorrect]
20. Albert Einstein or Mao Zedong? 75%, Einstein was born before 1900 and I think Mao wasn't. [Correct]

Which country had more people in 2019?

21. Germany or France? 55%. No idea. [Correct]
22. Japan or South Korea? 55%. [Incorrect]
23. Brazil or Argentina? 75%, but maybe Brazil just has more presence on the internet? [Correct]
24. Egypt or Botswana? 55%. [Correct]
25. Mexico or Guatemala? 65%. [Correct]
26. Panama or Belize? 55%. [Correct]
27. Jamaica or Haiti? 55%. [Incorrect]
28. Greece or Norway? 55%. [Correct]
29. China or India? 65%. [Correct]
30. Iraq or Iran? 65%. [Correct]

Science facts:

31. Mars has one moon, just like Earth. False, 95%. [Correct]
32. Scurvy is caused by a deficit of Vitamin C. True, 95%. [Correct]
33. Brass is made from iron and copper. False, 95%. [Correct]
34. One tablespoon of oil has more calories than one tablespoon of butter. True, 85%, seems like butter is bulked out with other stuff and oil is purer calories? Oil is flammable but butter isn't which implies higher energy density? [Correct]
35. Helium is the lightest element. False, 95%, probably means hydrogen but the question is bogus, elements don't have mass, maybe density but you still have to specify standard temperature and pressure. [Correct]
36. The common cold is caused by bacteria. False, 95%, it's caused by cold viruses. [Correct]
37. The deepest place on Earth is in the pacific ocean. False, 95%, it's the Mariana trench which is in the Atlantic. [Incorrect! The Mariana trench is in fact in the Pacific, d'oh!]
38. Seasons are caused by the earth orbiting the sun in an elliptical path. False, 95%, they're caused by the rotation axis inclination, the elliptical orbit doesn't vary enough to substantially change the amount of sunlight reaching the ground and even if it did you'd have the season cycle repeating twice per year rather than just once. [Correct]
39. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. I think true, 85%. [Correct]
40. The atoms in a solid are more densely packed than the atoms in a gas. I think true, 75%, but I'd also rather you specify which solid. Plausibly there are some solids which have higher atom density than other gases? Unsure, maybe you don't have to specify. [Correct]

Now I need to look up the answers, and make a tally of how many I got right and wrong of each confidence level.

• 55%: 7 of 11 (64%)
• 65%: 5 of 7 (71%)
• 75%: 6 of 6 (100%)
• 85%: 5 of 5 (100%)
• 95%: 7 of 11 (64%)

However 2 of the "95" questions that I got wrong were cases where I was actually right but mentally inverted the question. So you can argue that I got 9 out of 11 or 82%. But you don't find me going back through the answers I got right to make sure I didn't mentally invert the question, so it's kind of unfair to give myself a pass in those 2 cases.

I'm not sure there's enough questions to really work out how well-calibrated you are from this, because getting only 1 extra question right or wrong at a given level changes the result by so much. Still fun to do.