Isn’t Tool 0 of forecasting ‘Mind your own business’?
Thanks for inspiring the following bit of staircase wit, which might make it into some further version of the post: Tool 0 of forecasting is “forecast”. If you don’t do it, you can’t become better at it.
Gwern prefers PredictionBook—where you can, if you want, record private predictions—to GJP. For my part I prefer GJP, precisely because they ask me questions that might not occur to me otherwise, and the competitive aspect suits me. You could also do just fine by recording your own forecasts in a spreadsheet or a notepad, on whatever topics you like.
The key to accuracy is having fewer moving parts, all of which are visible and known by you.
Is accuracy what you’re after? Which component of accuracy? I can get perfect calibration by throwing a thousand coin flips and predicting 50% all the time. What I seek is debiasing, making the most of whatever information is available without overweighting any part of it (including my own hunches, feelings and fears); and I’m most vulnerable to bias when there are many moving parts, many of which are hidden from me or unknown to me.
Thanks for inspiring the following bit of staircase wit, which might make it into some further version of the post: Tool 0 of forecasting is “forecast”. If you don’t do it, you can’t become better at it.
Gwern prefers PredictionBook—where you can, if you want, record private predictions—to GJP. For my part I prefer GJP, precisely because they ask me questions that might not occur to me otherwise, and the competitive aspect suits me. You could also do just fine by recording your own forecasts in a spreadsheet or a notepad, on whatever topics you like.
Is accuracy what you’re after? Which component of accuracy? I can get perfect calibration by throwing a thousand coin flips and predicting 50% all the time. What I seek is debiasing, making the most of whatever information is available without overweighting any part of it (including my own hunches, feelings and fears); and I’m most vulnerable to bias when there are many moving parts, many of which are hidden from me or unknown to me.