Exercise 1: Fermi-izing a Real Prediction — Possible Solution ================================================================ This exercise has no single correct prediction to analyze - the point is applying the technique honestly to something real. A worked example, using "will my team win this weekend's match": ORIGINAL QUESTION (hard to estimate directly): "What's the probability my team wins this weekend?" FERMI-IZED SUB-QUESTIONS: 1. What's the probability our star player, who's been carrying an injury, is actually fit to start? (A concrete, checkable fact - team news is usually published before the match.) 2. Given that player's actual availability, what's our team's real recent form (e.g. results in the last five matches) against opponents of similar quality to this weekend's? 3. What's the specific home/away context (are we playing at home, where our team has historically performed better)? Each of these three sub-questions is genuinely easier to estimate on its own than the original all-at-once question, since each draws on a specific, checkable piece of information rather than requiring an intuitive gut estimate for the whole match at once. Combining honest answers to all three gives a more grounded final estimate than jumping straight to a single overall percentage. ANSWER: (worked example) Original: "Will my team win?" Fermi-ized into: (1) will the key injured player actually start, (2) what's recent form against similarly-ranked opponents, (3) home or away context - each sub-question is more directly checkable than guessing the final outcome all at once. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This applies the chapter's own real Fermi-izing technique to a genuine prediction, breaking it into concretely checkable sub-questions rather than restating the original question in different words.