The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin · 18 Aug 2014 · 685pp · 203,949 words
a city bus?” “How many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups would it take to encircle the globe at the equator?” and “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge
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of the world to fill in the blanks. How would you solve the problem of “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Google wants to know how people make sense of the problem—how they divide up the knowns and unknowns systematically. Remember, you can
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’t simply call the Piano Tuners Union of Chicago and ask; you have to work this from facts (or reasonable guesses) that you can pull out of your head. Breaking down the problem
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times per year is a given piano tuned?) How long it takes to tune a piano How many hours a year the average piano tuner works The number of pianos in Chicago Knowing these will help you arrive at an answer. If you know how often pianos are tuned and how long it takes
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÷ 1,000 pianos tuned by each piano tuner). Add 15% to that number to account for travel time, meaning that there are approximately 58 piano tuners in Chicago. What is the real answer? The Yellow Pages for Chicago lists 83. This includes some duplicates (businesses with more than one phone number are listed
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner · 14 Sep 2015 · 317pp · 100,414 words
. It’s how you use it. Fermi-ize Here’s a question that definitely was not asked in the forecasting tournament: How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? Don’t even think about letting Google find the answer for you. The Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi—a central figure in the invention
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down by asking, “What information would allow me to answer the question?” So what would we need to know to calculate the number of piano tuners in Chicago? Well, the number of piano tuners depends on how much piano-tuning work there is and how much work it takes to employ one piano
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Chicago. Then I can divide it by the last and, just like that, I’ll have a pretty good sense of how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. But I don’t have any of that information! So you may think I’ve wasted my time by exchanging one question I can
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-tuning hours. Divide that by the annual number of hours worked by one piano tuner and you get 62.5 piano tuners in Chicago. So I will estimate that there are sixty-three piano tuners in Chicago. How close am I? Many people have taken a crack at Fermi’s classic puzzler over the years, including
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the psychologist Daniel Levitin, whose presentation I’ve adapted here.6 Levitin found eighty-three listings for piano tuners in the Chicago yellow pages, but many were duplicates, such as businesses with more than one phone number. So the precise number isn’t certain. But my
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
by Studs Terkel · 1 Jan 1974 · 926pp · 312,419 words
happy few who find a savor in their daily job: the Indiana stonemason, who looks upon his work and sees that it is good; the Chicago piano tuner, who seeks and finds the sound that delights; the bookbinder, who saves a piece of history; the Brooklyn fireman, who saves a piece of life
Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
by Tom Chivers · 6 May 2024 · 283pp · 102,484 words
the Fermi estimate, named for the great nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi. The classic example is a problem Fermi gave his students: estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago. Most people would think that that’s an impossible question or might just pull a number out of nowhere in particular. “I dunno, a
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year, and each piano tuner can tune eight hundred of them in a year, then you need about 25,000/800 = 62.5 piano tuners to keep all of Chicago’s pianos in tune.28 Fermi found that breaking down the estimates like this usually ended up with answers not too far from
These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield · 11 Mar 2025 · 412pp · 122,298 words
classical models. This is why, despite being a neural network, LLMs are better at calculus, C++ and Fermi problems (like estimating the total number of piano tuners in Chicago) than your average adult human. There is no magical missing ingredient, no ‘unobtanium’ that forever elevates human cognition to a mystical higher plane. The
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by William Poundstone · 4 Jan 2012 · 260pp · 77,007 words
.” Back at the University of Chicago, Fermi tormented his students with only somewhat easier questions. His most famous classroom riddle was, “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Fermi staunchly believed that anyone with a PhD in physics should be able to estimate just about anything. Somewhere along the line the “PhD
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez · 27 Jun 2016 · 559pp · 155,372 words
was a Penn grad, of course). His angle was analytical ability, and he asked me a variant of that legendary Enrico Fermi brainteaser about piano tuners in Chicago. His variant was to estimate the number of planes in the sky at any given moment. It required nothing more than some rough base assumptions
Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal · 21 Feb 2017 · 407pp · 90,238 words
his position and privilege, and empowers everyone else to make sense of their own experiences. When the physicist Enrico Fermi famously guessed the number of piano tuners in Chicago, or the number of stars in our galaxy, he did so by applying provisional estimates to impossibly large problems. And while never exact, his
The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far
by Lawrence M. Krauss · 21 Mar 2017 · 335pp · 95,280 words
lunchtime each day to the team working for him. My favorite problem, which I always assign to my introductory-physics students, is “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Try it. If you get between one hundred and five hundred, you did well. Fermi won the Nobel Prize for his experimental work