I like the strategy, though (from my experience) I do think it might be a big ask for at least online experimental subjects to track what’s going on. But there are also ways in which that’s a virtue—if you just tell them that there are no (good) ways to game the system, they’ll probably mostly trust you and not bother to try to figure it out. So something like that might indeed work! I don’t know exactly what calibration folks have tried in this domain, so will have to dig into it more. But it definitely seems like there should be SOME sensible way (along these lines, or otherwise) of incentivizing giving their true 90% intervals—and a theory like the one we sketched would predict that that should make a difference (or: if it doesn’t, it’s definitely a failure of at least local rationality).
On the second point, I think we’re agreed! I’d definitely like to work out more of a theory for when we should expect rational people to switch from guessing to other forms of estimates. We definitely don’t have that yet, so it’s a good challenge. I’ll take that as motivation for developing that more!
Crossposting from Substack:
Super interesting!
I like the strategy, though (from my experience) I do think it might be a big ask for at least online experimental subjects to track what’s going on. But there are also ways in which that’s a virtue—if you just tell them that there are no (good) ways to game the system, they’ll probably mostly trust you and not bother to try to figure it out. So something like that might indeed work! I don’t know exactly what calibration folks have tried in this domain, so will have to dig into it more. But it definitely seems like there should be SOME sensible way (along these lines, or otherwise) of incentivizing giving their true 90% intervals—and a theory like the one we sketched would predict that that should make a difference (or: if it doesn’t, it’s definitely a failure of at least local rationality).
On the second point, I think we’re agreed! I’d definitely like to work out more of a theory for when we should expect rational people to switch from guessing to other forms of estimates. We definitely don’t have that yet, so it’s a good challenge. I’ll take that as motivation for developing that more!