the.com/estimation
Being roughly right fast beats being exactly right too late.
means A rough calculation or judgment of amount, value, or worth, made without claiming exact precision.
from From Latin aestimare, 'to value, appraise, assess the worth of' — the same root that gives us 'esteem.' An estimate and the esteem you hold someone in are etymological siblings: both are acts of weighing worth, one applied to numbers, the other to people.
- fermi's gift
- physicists guess within 10x before calculating exactly
- rounding power
- bar napkin math built the atomic bomb's yield predictions
- the trap
- false precision feels smarter but hides bigger errors
- real skill
- knowing which digits actually matter