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army1987 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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???
The only expansion of that I can find with Google (Wifes And Girlfriends [of footballers]) doesn't seem too relevant.
Wild Ass Guess.
Was that just meta, or did you already know it? In what fields would the saying be more common, out of curiosity?
It's reasonably common among engineers in my experience. Along with SWAG -- scientific wild-assed guessed, intended to denote something that has minimal support -- an estimation that is the output of combining WAGs and actual data, for example.
He may not have known it, but it's used. I worked in Catastrophe Risk modeling, and it was a term that applied to what our clients and competitors did; not ourselves, we had rigorous methodologies that were not discussed because they were "trade secrets," or as I came to understand, what is referred to below as SWAG.
I have heard engineers use it as well..