Great story headline, extremely poor content. He reveals very little about how he came up with his guess. All you are left with are just obvious statements:
Here, my costs were negative—it was an interesting and fun problem to consider and even small projects are opportunities to teach and improve—and the upside was positive. Why not make a bet?
I'm really not interested in learning when you should make a prediction; I'm more interested in learning how you make the best prediction. In the end, I am left disappointed.
In absence of much explanation about how you reached your predictions, it sounds like you just picked a number off your gut since you had nothing to lose.
Good point. I helped run the contest, and want add a bit more background.
Robert's answer was in many ways an educated guess. He took some of the numbers, looked at other projects and put it together to get a good guess.
However his motivation for making a guess was spot on. We got a lot of answers that were more thorough. But just as Robert conjectured, these were all relatively similar, and all under predicted the true number of backers.
Robert's prediction was the highest prediction that we got, mostly because he was able to correctly guess that there would be another wave of supporters before the backing period ended.
Here, my costs were negative—it was an interesting and fun problem to consider and even small projects are opportunities to teach and improve—and the upside was positive. Why not make a bet?
I'm really not interested in learning when you should make a prediction; I'm more interested in learning how you make the best prediction. In the end, I am left disappointed.
In absence of much explanation about how you reached your predictions, it sounds like you just picked a number off your gut since you had nothing to lose.