Coaching practices for 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 and the Only Way to Find Out is to Start Scoring Myself Over Many Calls

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

  • 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 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
  • 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
  • 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 keep being so sure I’m right and then being wrong, and I have no way to see whether my confidence actually means anything

Practices that may help

  1. Practice probability calibration
    Regularly make probabilistic predictions and track your accuracy across many of them.
    Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Maintain a scored prediction log
    Record predictions with explicit probabilities and score them when they resolve.
    Calibration Training
  5. 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
  6. Confidence-accuracy gap tracking
    After each test, compute and record the gap between your predicted and actual scores.
    Feeling of Knowing: Why Your Confidence Misleads You
  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. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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

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