I’ve seen a lot of people on LW use tools like Predictionbook or Fatebook for tracking personal predictions in their daily life. However, I wasn’t able to find any information on specific reasons to do that. Fatebook lists a few vague points on its about page, but they aren’t really elaborated on.
Is personal prediction tracking just a more interesting version of a calibration test? So you just track your predictions about your life and then look at the calibration graph to check if you’re over- or underconfident? Or are there any other benefits?
The aforementioned Fatebook page lists “make better decisions” and “communicate more clearly”. I can see how phrasing your beliefs as probabilities instead of “yes/no” questions could help with that—but how does prediction tracking in particular help with it?
Personal prediction tracking seems intended to refine one’s prediction skills, so that one can make increasingly accurate predictions about what will happen.
How many problems in your life have ultimately been caused by poor prediction-making skills? Almost any regret can be “why”’d into the root cause of a bad prediction: “I regret not saying goodbye because I incorrectly predicted that I would definitely see them again”, “I regret not addressing that relationship problem while it was small because I inaccurately predicted that it was unimportant”, “I regret not investing in a certain stock when it was super cheap because I inaccurately predicted it would not increase in value”.
From this perspective, it seems obvious that making better predictions creates a life of fewer regrets.
Thanks. This makes sense, but I don’t get how tracking your prediction would lead to improvement in your prediction skills. Do you have to actively look at your past prediction statistics and see how you can improve, or does this improvement just comes naturally with practice?
When you set out to intentionally build a skill, how do you do it?
For most people, skill-building has elements of both tracking and self-assessment.