Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
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Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#2I wasn't expecting this to go on hnews yet, but happy to take any questions!
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#3Nice, but I can't help thinking of spreadsheets as something of a crutch.
Also check out:
http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/
https://github.com/taschini/pyinterval http://mavrinac.com/index.cgi?page=fuzzpy
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#4Direct link to Github: https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#5Nice, but I can't help thinking of spreadsheets as something of a crutch. Also check out: http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/ https://github.com/taschini/pyinterval http://mavrinac.com/index.cgi?page=fuzzpy
Spreadsheets definitely have a lot of downsides compared to full programming languages, but there are some strong upsides. I think Guesstimate is good for relatively simple models (compared to large programs) of specific things; these are intended to be very visual (so you can see how uncertainty propagates through a system) and collaborative (so people can disagree on specific estimates).
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#6What fun - I did a monte carlo estimate a few years back when trying to determine what purchases price of house my girlfriend and I could afford. It depended on probable interest rate, how much my old house would sell for, etc. It'd be interesting to see how simply it could be modeled in this.
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#7I think this is super cool! We're so bad at estimating probabilities (think Han Solo's "never tell me the odds") that this helps visualize the distribution of outcomes
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#8Interesting idea - but you could certainly do this in any spreadsheet application with multiple cells to represent ranges etc.. I think the of estimating probabilities issue can be considered to be more of a practices issue than a tools issue.
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#9I wasn't expecting this to go on hnews yet, but happy to take any questions!
Any plans to add different probability distributions? I do this kind of analysis by hand for things like project timelines and cost estimates, but I model each variable with a double triangular distribution (http://www.mhnederlof.nl/doubletriangular.html). You provide a best case, worst case, and then the most likely case. The distribution approximates the long tails on many kinds of distributions.
Re: Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain
#10This is really cool. Can anyone recommend any particularly good/cogent Simple Caveman explanations of how Bayesoan theory/Monte Carlo simulation work?