Pre-commit to resolution criteria before making a prediction

Define exactly what counts as "I was right" before the outcome happens.

Why it works

Vague predictions survive almost any outcome — "I said things might get complicated" is consistent with disaster or success. This outcome-flexibility is a form of motivated reasoning that prevents calibration feedback from ever arriving. Pre-committing to specific, verifiable resolution criteria closes the escape hatch: the prediction either resolves correctly or it doesn’t, and you can’t post-hoc reconstruct what you "really" meant.

How to do it

1. When recording a prediction, write the resolution criteria in the same entry: "This is correct if X happens by Y date."
2. Make criteria measurable: "more than 50% market share," "shipped by Q4," not "does reasonably well."
3. Do not revise the criteria after the prediction is made — the revision is the measurement you’re trying to collect.
4. Include a "null" condition: what would count as the prediction being indeterminate?

Evidence

The Good Judgment Project required all predictions to have explicit resolution criteria; this structural requirement is credited as a key reason its calibration measurements were meaningful. The practice is clinical/institutional rather than separately trialed as an intervention. (clinical)

Some real-world events resist clean binary resolution; the resolution criteria exercise is most powerful for near-term specific predictions and less clean for long-horizon, complex outcomes.

Common mistake

Writing "I was right about the general direction" as retrospective resolution criteria after a disappointing outcome — this is hindsight reframing, not scoring.