The art of smart guessing 中文翻译

2021年1月26日发(作者：审查报告)
The Art of Smart Guessing
Several years ago interviewing candidates for a job I grew tired
of asking What experience do you have So I decided on a one-question
quiz to find out how resourceful a thinker the new hire might be. Her
e it is:
几年前我厌倦问面试应聘者“你有什么经验”所以我决定用一个问题 的测验
来了解新员工有多么的足智多谋。那就是

You are on a yacht sailing the Pacific Ocean. Your navigator anno
unces you are over the deepest point the Mariana Trench. Just then a
clumsy guest accidentally drops a 12-pound cannonball over the side.
How long will it take for the cannonball to reach the bottom of the o
cean
你在一艘航行于太平 洋的游艇上。
你的导航仪显示你是在最深的地方——马
里亚纳海沟之上。就在那时一个笨拙的客 人不小心将一枚
12
磅重的炮弹扔了下
去。炮弹落到海底需要多长时间

Before reading on please try to solve this yourself--paying speci
al attention to how you might solve it.
在继续阅读之前请设法自己解决这个问题——特别注意你如何解决它。

Did you make a completely wild guess because there wasnt enough i
nformation Did you get too bogged down in the details trying to come
up with the exactly right answer Or did you zero in on the two most i
mportant problems--how deep is the Mariana Trench and how fast might
a cannonball fall through the water-- then hazard a guesstimate
你是否因为“没有足够的信息”而做了一个完全的猜测你是否过于陷入细节< br>试图找出
“正确”
答案还是你瞄准的两个最重要的问题——马里亚纳海沟有多深
和炮弹在水中以多块的速度落下——然后大胆猜测

Most of my candidates simply made a wild guess thinking that if t
hey couldnt be 100-percent right there was no use trying to be 95-per
cent right. Rarely was someone willing to risk an approximation.
我的大多数应聘者只是胡乱猜测想他们认为自己不可能
100
正确即使
95
正
确也是没有用的。

很少有人愿意大胆猜测。

What does this have to do with business or creativity A great dea
l. In the real world we frequently need to make decisions when the fu
ll information does not exist. From what foods we eat to how to raise
our kids creative people must think for themselves. There may not be
the time or the money to make sure of all your decisions. Your best
guess will often be the best you can do.
这与商业或创造力有什么关系呢事实上有很多关系。
在现 实世界中我们经常
需要在没有完整信息的情况下做出决定。
从我们吃什么食物到如何培养自己的 孩
子有创造力的人必须独立思考。
你可能没有时间或金钱来确保你所有的决定。
最好的猜测常常会成为你最应该做的事情。

Suppose for example youve been asked to write a marketing plan fo
r a new telephone device that will send your name company address and
telephone number to a visual display or printer on another persons p
hone. In addition to conventional outlets like mass merchandisers and
electronics stores youd like to know the number of phone stores in t
he United States. Unfortunately this figure is not available either f
rom market-research houses or from the U.S. government. What do you d
o
打个比方假定你要为一个新的电话设备写一个营销计划这个设备会将您的
大名、 公司、地址、电话号码发送到别人的手机的显示器或打印机上。除了常规
网点像大商场和电子卖场你还要 了解美国
“手机店”
的数量。
不幸的是这个数字
无论是从市场研究机构或从美 国政府

都不可能得到。你会怎么做

One solution would be to go to your local library pull out a few
phone directories from around the country turn to the Yellow Pages an
d start counting. You could then guesstimate how many stores there we
re nationwide based on the number of stores per 100000 people in each
of the cities you counted. This by the way is exactly what a marketi
ng consultant I know did for a large telecommunications client.
一个解决办法是去您当地的图书馆拉出来自 全国各地的几个电话目录打开
黄页然后开始数。接着你就可以

根据你所数的每个城市里每十万人会有多少家店来猜测全国有多少家店。

顺便说一下 这是我知道的一个营销顾问为一个大型电信客户所做的市场调查的
确切做法。

The question about phone stores was an example of what scientists
call a Fermi problem named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enric
o Fermi who used problems such as this to teach his students how to t
hink for themselves. A Fermi problem does not contain all the informa
tion you need to solve it precisely.
手机店的问题是科学家所谓的费米问题的一个例子费 米问题是由诺贝尔奖
得主物理学家恩里科·
费米所命名他曾用这类问题来教他的学生独立思考。
费米
问题不包含所有你需要的信息但你必须准确地解决它。
Fermi is said to hav
e once asked his university students how many piano tuners there were
in Chicago. To answer the question he recommended breaking it down i
nto smaller more manageable questions and then having the courage to
make some guesses and assumptions. How many people live in Chicago Th
ree million would be a reasonable estimate. How many people per famil
y Assume an average of four. How many families own pianos Say one out
of three. Then there are about 250000 pianos in Chicago. How often w
ould each be tuned Maybe once every five years. That makes 50000 tuni
ngs a year. How many pianos can one tuner tune in a day Four And how
many in a year Assuming 250 working days one tuner can handle 1000 pi
anos a year.