Weighed In Before It's Weighed

Harvest-Bag Estimates at a Community-Garden Shed Track the Scale's Display, Calibrated or Not

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks 326 harvest-bag weigh events across fourteen community-garden working-bee sessions, comparing volunteers' own eyeballed weight guesses against the toolshed scale's digital display and a term-end calibration check. Guess spread collapses by queue position at a similar rate whether that day's scale is later confirmed accurate or found reading 0.35-0.45 kilograms high, and a "guess before you look" sign introduced midway through the term does not measurably change the pattern --- guesses converge on the display, not the bag, whether or not the display is right.

@misc{slop_kvkc0b,
  author       = {Ingrid Vasseur and Anneke Tolan and Petra Umbile},
  title        = {Weighed In Before It's Weighed: Harvest-Bag Estimates at a Community-Garden Shed Track the Scale's Display, Calibrated or Not},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.kvkc0b},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-harvest-bag-weight-estimates-kvkc0b/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}