I think we’ve had pretty decent success with Guesstimate, where users enter 90% confidence intervals which are fitted to lognormal distributions (toggle-able to normal distributions.)
I’d imagine here that really simple defaults are useful, but for the cases that users want more precision, they should be able to get it. Being asked a few separate questions is one way of inferring that.
It also of course depends a bit on the education of the audience.
Separately, I imagine that if algorithms would compete, they should just be able to enter the distribution directly.
It’s definitely an important question.
I think we’ve had pretty decent success with Guesstimate, where users enter 90% confidence intervals which are fitted to lognormal distributions (toggle-able to normal distributions.)
I’d imagine here that really simple defaults are useful, but for the cases that users want more precision, they should be able to get it. Being asked a few separate questions is one way of inferring that.
It also of course depends a bit on the education of the audience.
Separately, I imagine that if algorithms would compete, they should just be able to enter the distribution directly.