Jev's trivia gap: science easy, video games and anime hard

On pub-quiz trivia, which categories does Jev know and which does it miss, and does it find the questions people rated hard harder?

result2,769 questions

Jev misses pub-quiz questions about games, anime and TV most: it gets video game questions right 73% of the time, anime and manga 74% and television 77%, against 98% to 100% for mythology, animals and art. By the quiz's own difficulty labels it goes 92%, 85% and 81% for easy, medium and hard.

60%80%100%

Video Games

Anime & Manga

Television

Music

Cartoon & Animations

Books

Comics

Computers

Film

General Knowledge

History

Sports

Geography

Science & Nature

Mythology

Animals

Art

Jev

How to read this: Each row is one quiz category, with the share of questions Jev got right and a 90% interval. Categories with fewer than 40 questions are left off.

2,760 questions in 17 categories with 40+; 90% intervals by bootstrap. The same gap shows in Wikidata: see knowledge_fame_online for internet culture.

In short

Jev's trivia gaps are in pop culture: 73% right on video games and 74% on anime and manga, against 98% on mythology and animals.
The category matters more than the difficulty label: questions tagged easy, medium and hard go 92%, 85% and 81%.
Its misses are the details of games, shows and anime, the kind of fact that lives on fan wikis more than in encyclopedias.

What the data shows

Afraid To Ask Andy meme: mythology and animals: 98%; video games: 73%. and at this point I'm afraid to ask

Games, anime and TV are the weak spot: video games 73% (529 questions), anime and manga 74%, television 77%, music and cartoons 82%.
The classics are near perfect: art 100%, animals and mythology 98%, science and nature 98%, geography 96%.
Difficulty tracks, gently: easy 92%, medium 85%, hard 81%. The category matters more than the difficulty label.
On the Portal cake, Jev picks Devil's Food with 60% confidence; the answer is Black Forest.

What it means, and what it doesn't

Jev's general knowledge is strong, and its gaps are specific: the details of games, shows and anime, the kind of fact that lives on fan wikis more than in encyclopedias. That matches its trouble judging which internet meme is better known (see "Jev knows who's famous in history, not what's famous online").

It doesn't measure how smart Jev is: a volunteer quiz with four options, where a blind guess gets 25%, is a rough instrument.

Caveats

Written by volunteers. The Open Trivia Database is written and rated by contributors. Difficulty is one person's judgment, and some answers are the contributor's opinion of what counts as right.
Pop culture ages fast. Video game and TV trivia is often about details from a specific release or episode; those are exactly the facts that are thinly written up, and some may postdate what Jev learned.
Multiple choice. Four options make guessing easier than open answers: a random guess gets 25%.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes74%
Does it describe you?: No59%
Would you have predicted it?: No57%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is reasonable
How much should a reader rely on it?: Moderately
Which caveat matters most?: Pop culture ages fast50%

Why ask this

Trivia is a quick map of what a model has absorbed well. A pub quiz database, split into categories, shows where the knowledge is thick and where it thins out. That matters to anyone who asks a model about a game's plot, a show's cast or a band's discography and takes the answer on trust.

Every question also carries an easy, medium or hard label from the person who wrote it, a rough outside check on whether what a quiz writer thinks is hard is also hard for the model.

How this was done

The people and the data

The Open Trivia Database is a free quiz database (CC BY-SA 4.0) written by volunteers, who give every question a category and a difficulty rating. This experiment uses its 2,760 multiple-choice questions, four options each, in the 17 categories with at least 40 questions. Video games is by far the largest, with 529 questions; the smallest, art, has 41.

What Jev was asked

Each question as the database has it, with its four options:

The cake depicted in Valve's "Portal" franchise most closely resembles which real-world type of cake?
Devil's Food · German Chocolate · Black Forest · Molten Chocolate

Each was also asked with the options in shuffled orders.

How it was measured

The share right per category and per difficulty rating, with 90% intervals.

Where these questions live

2,769 questions across 237 topics of the map; the 16 biggest are shown. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Every question

All 2,769 questions behind this result, the telling ones first: the examples the analysis points to, then the ones where Jev misses, biggest gap first.

Jev’s own answer

Showing 0 of 2,769