gwern comments on 1001 PredictionBook Nights - Less Wrong

51 Post author: gwern 08 October 2011 04:04PM

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Comment author: Craig_Heldreth 08 October 2011 07:16:18PM 2 points [-]

There is a lot of good stuff to think about in this article. I especially like the poker post on "this is what 5% feels like" as it is in line with a number of things which I have enjoyed doing to calibrate my own intuition. Some of those items posted on prediction book confuse me, however.

Example: "‘I predict…a major earthquake, magnitude seven or more will happen within twenty kilometers of a line from nagano city, nagano to matsudo, chiba’ posted by gwern." And then you predict 100% against. (Ignoring the conventional wisdom that 1.0 is not a probability) I wonder what you are doing with such an item which seems a waste of keystrokes and brain thought cycles. Can you go into (a little more) what you are doing there?

Comment author: gwern 08 October 2011 07:44:32PM 2 points [-]

PB doesn't allow you to put in decimals, so it's sort of understood that 100% simply means >99.5% or so. There I simply noticed a stupid prediction and decided to note it down; easy predictions are relaxing, and I had just put in scores of Eva predictions.