So one thing that I hate is when people refuse to give out estimates. I’m not talking about complex Fermi questions, but run-of-the-mill every day questions like:

• How long does this medicine usually takes to act?
• How much does it cost to fix my car’s A/C?
• How flexible would the landlord be in negotiating rent?
• How much work does a new feature need in our frontend?

Many times, there’s a good reason for that. Maybe they really don’t know. Or they don’t want to commit to something because they’re afraid you (or someone else) will try to hold them accountable for their answer. Maybe it is complicated and really it depends, or they just don’t want to deal with pesky me asking more questions than needed.

But thing is I do want to know. I want to know, even though it’s not gonna be a perfect estimate, but it helps me mentally know at least what I’m looking at. Even a semi-random guesstimate would be enough in many cases.

So far I’ve got a trick that I think works; it works on my car mechanic, it works on our pediatrician, it works on predatory real estate agents. I call it “the three orders of magnitude”.

Ok, so what do I do?

First off, you tell the other person that you’re just curious; you won’t hold them to their answer, it’s not final, you just want a gut reaction, it’s not the end of the world, who cares yadda yadda.

Then, you present two values in a range, that both sounds implausibly silly; two, or more often three orders of magnitude apart:

• So will the bump go away in 5 minutes or 5 days?
• So is this 1 day or 1 quarter worth of work?
• So will materials cost $20 or $20k?

Often the answer is “Pfft are you crazy? $20 doesn’t get you an ice-cream and $20k gets you a new car. I’d say somewhere around $300 and we’ll fix the old A/C”.

The goal is to make the other person scoff at both ends of the range, but in a way that they can’t “just” choose the middle of it to weasel out of giving an answer.

Outro

So, how are you gonna use it? Just this once, a thousand times in your lifetime? What’d you say?

Until next time, bye!