Coaching practices for Estimation Accuracy Tracking
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Estimation Accuracy Tracking, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My guesses never seem to get any better because I make them, find out the real answer, and then just move on
- I’m late on something, I shrug, update the calendar, and immediately forget I ever thought it’d take half as long
- I’m sure about things constantly and I have no idea if that confidence is earned
- I make calls about how things will go all the time, but I never write them down or check them after
- I call myself good at reading how things will go in my field, but when I’m honest I only ever remember the calls I got right
Practices that may help
- 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 - Log actual vs. estimated time for every task
Build a personal database of your own estimation errors so you can calibrate future predictions.
The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong - 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 - 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 - Track the accuracy of your domain predictions
Keep a record of what you predicted in your area of claimed expertise and score it.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Understood Clearly - Practice confidence interval estimation
Estimate ranges for factual quantities and check how often the true value falls within your range.
Calibration Training - Practice probability calibration
Regularly make probabilistic predictions and track your accuracy across many of them.
Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect - Maintain a scored prediction log
Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
Calibration Training - Keep a decision journal to score your EV estimates
Log your probability estimates and payoff predictions, then compare them to what happened.
Expected Value Thinking: Deciding Under Uncertainty - Anchor on the base rate before adding inside-view details
Start your forecast from the class median, then adjust — do not start from your narrative and adjust to the base rate.
Reference Class Forecasting
Related concerns
- When Outside View Track And Score Past Predictions
Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
Maintain a scored prediction log
- Estimation 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.
- Forecast Accuracy Log
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
- 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.
- Forecasting 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.
- How To Improve Predictions
Take prediction errors as performance feedback, not as proof that forecasting is futile.
Treat forecasting accuracy as a skill that improves with practice
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