What Do Confidence Levels Mean? 10 Coaching Practices to Try
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What Do Confidence Levels Mean, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- Anchor your confidence level on base rates, not gut feel
Start your confidence estimate from the historical hit rate for this type of prediction, not from how confident you feel.
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 - Track your calibration across many predictions
Score your confidence levels against outcomes over dozens of predictions to find your systematic biases.
Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time - Practice confidence interval estimation
Estimate ranges for factual quantities and check how often the true value falls within your range.
Calibration Training - Maintain a scored prediction log
Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
Calibration Training - Regression-to-mean awareness in JOLs
Discount your highest-confidence JOLs most — they are the most likely to be inflated.
Judgments of Learning: Why You Misjudge What You’ve Learned - 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. - Distinguish uncertainty (quantifiable) from ignorance (unquantifiable)
Know when you can assign a probability and when the situation is so novel that a number would be fabricated.
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 - Translate beliefs into bets to reveal your true confidence
Would you bet $100 on that belief at even odds? The answer often reveals the gap between claimed and actual confidence.
Bayesian Thinking: How to Update Beliefs Rationally
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My confidence comes straight from how good a story I can tell myself about this particular case, and the more vivid the story the surer I get
- When I say I’m eighty percent sure I genuinely don’t know if that means anything
- I keep being so sure I’m right and then being wrong, and I have no way to see whether my confidence actually means anything
- When I’d swear I know roughly where a number lands, the real answer is constantly outside the range I’d have bet on
- 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
Related concerns
- How To Solve Confidence Level
Start your confidence estimate from the historical hit rate for this type of prediction, not from how confident you feel.
Anchor your confidence level on base rates, not gut feel
- Stable Confidence
Start your confidence estimate from the historical hit rate for this type of prediction, not from how confident you feel.
- Calibrated Confidence
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 Improvement Techniques
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.
- Reference Class Confidence
Start your confidence estimate from the historical hit rate for this type of prediction, not from how confident you feel.
- Stable Confidence Base
Start your confidence estimate from the historical hit rate for this type of prediction, not from how confident you feel.
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