Kaiser writes,

Been leafing through the “Super Crunchers” book over the weekend. . . . Halfway through it, I am still trying to figure out if “super crunching” means traditional statistics or data mining. It is not without irony that the author seems to equate the two. Regardless, it’s still good publicity for our field.

One example that seemed to have caught on [comes] from a book called “Decision Traps” by Russo and Schoemaker (who I think are business consultants). The idea is a catchy one, which is to illustrate the “over-confidence” of decision makers. The trick they used is to ask people to provide interval estimates at 90% confidence to a list of 10 questions such as “What was Martin Luther King Jr’s age at death?”, and “In what year was Mozart born?”. Out of 1000+ respondents, they found that “less than 1 percent of the people gave ranges that included the right answer nine or ten times. Ninety-nine percent of people were overconfident.” (pp.112-114 in the book). . . . Have you done anything similar with your students?

As far as I know the original idea came from an example of Alpert and Raiffa. I’ve had lots of success doing an adaptation of the Alpert and Raiffa demo in class; see Section 13.2.2 of my book with Nolan on Teaching Statistics book or section 4 of this paper.

There’s also a more standard confidence coverage demo in Section 8.4 of Teaching Statistics. That one works well in class too.