Coaching practices for Epistemic Calibration
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Epistemic Calibration, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- There’s one area I consider myself an expert in, and that’s exactly where I’m most stubbornly sure and most often wrong
- When I say I’m eighty percent sure I genuinely don’t know if that means anything
- I make calls about how things will go all the time, but I never write them down or check them after
- I want to actually know whether my gut is any good — when I feel sure about something, am I right that often, or am I just confident?
- My real decisions take months to resolve and matter too much for me to score them honestly, so I never get clean reps
Practices that may help
- Calibration Training
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable. - Identify the specific domains where you are most overconfident
Calibration is domain-specific — find where your confidence most exceeds your accuracy.
Calibration Training - Practice calibration by tracking your confidence predictions
Your "80% confident" beliefs should come true about 80% of the time — check that they do.
Bayesian Thinking: How to Update Beliefs Rationally - Score your own past predictions to calibrate your outside-view use
Keep a forecast log and score it — you cannot improve calibration without feedback on where you were over- or under-confident.
The Outside View - Practice probability calibration
Regularly make probabilistic predictions and track your accuracy across many of them.
Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect - Build calibration reps with low-stakes trivia and almanac questions
Use factual trivia questions as a practice ground for calibration — outcomes resolve immediately and the stakes are zero.
Calibration Training - Practice probabilistic calibration by tracking your predictions
Assign explicit probability estimates to your predictions and track whether they come true at the right rate.
Base-Rate Neglect: Why We Ignore the Odds - Practice intellectual humility: "I might be wrong"
Maintain a live list of beliefs you hold with high confidence but acknowledge could be wrong — and say so out loud.
The Socratic Method, Made Practical - Update beliefs frequently and in small increments
When new evidence arrives, adjust your probability estimate — even if the change is small.
Superforecasting - Track your estimates and calibrate
Compare your Fermi estimates to actual figures when you can, and use the gap to improve future estimates.
Fermi Estimation
Related concerns
- Forecast Calibration
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Attribution Calibration
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Calibration Control Classification
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Calibration Tracking Decisions
Keep a forecast log and score it — you cannot improve calibration without feedback on where you were over- or under-confident.
Score your own past predictions to calibrate your outside-view use
- Calibration Training When Starting Out
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
- Confidence Calibration
Calibration training teaches you to match your stated confidence levels to your actual accuracy: if you say "70% confident," roughly 70% of those claims should turn out to be correct. Tetlock’s forecasting research and probability training studies show calibration is trainable with practice and feedback — the evidence here is specific and replicable.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.