Coaching practices for Forecasting Calibration

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Forecasting Calibration, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I make calls about how things will go all the time, but I never write them down or check them after
  • I make calls all the time but I never write them down or check them later, so my confidence is just a feeling that floats free
  • 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?
  • I’m sure about things constantly and I have no idea if that confidence is earned
  • When I say I’m eighty percent sure I genuinely don’t know if that means anything

Practices that may help

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. Maintain a scored prediction log
    Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
    Calibration Training
  4. Practice probability calibration
    Regularly make probabilistic predictions and track your accuracy across many of them.
    Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
  5. 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
  6. Calibration practice
    Predict your performance before each retrieval test, then compare prediction to outcome.
    Self-Regulated Learning: Taking Control of How You Learn
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. Treat forecasting accuracy as a skill that improves with practice
    Take prediction errors as performance feedback, not as proof that forecasting is futile.
    Superforecasting
  10. 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

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