Coaching practices for Superforecasting Calibration

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Superforecasting 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
  • When a prediction of mine blows up, I either spiral into thinking the whole thing is pointless or I just shrug and forget it
  • 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. 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
  2. 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.
  3. Treat forecasting accuracy as a skill that improves with practice
    Take prediction errors as performance feedback, not as proof that forecasting is futile.
    Superforecasting
  4. Superforecasting
    Philip Tetlock’s forecasting tournament research found that a subset of ordinary people — "superforecasters" — consistently outperform domain experts and intelligence analysts at probabilistic prediction. They share measurable cognitive and behavioral habits: they think in probabilities, update frequently on evidence, and actively seek disconfirming information. These habits are learnable.
  5. Practice probability calibration
    Regularly make probabilistic predictions and track your accuracy across many of them.
    Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
  6. 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
  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. Maintain a scored prediction log
    Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
    Calibration Training
  9. Update beliefs frequently and in small increments
    When new evidence arrives, adjust your probability estimate — even if the change is small.
    Superforecasting
  10. Update your forecast incrementally as new evidence arrives
    Treat your forecast as a probability that should shift with each new piece of evidence, not a commitment that survives contradiction.
    Reference Class Forecasting

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