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JoachimSchipper comments on New Year's Prediction Thread (2012) - Less Wrong
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Do you think you could make a hundred predictions like "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality will be updated this year" or "The Winds of Winter will not be released this year" and only be wrong once? Maybe you're right, but your confidence seems high to me. (Note that 98% resp. 96% allows you two resp. four errors.)
Yes, I really mean that high confidence. The Winds of Winter is the sixth in a series; the fifth was released in July, six years after the fourth, which was released two years after it was due and five years after the third book. The author is slipping, the books are getting longer and less manageable and the author enjoys watching football. He's also spent a LONG time promoting his latest book so aggressively I'm just about sure he can't have been writing for months. It's just barely conceivable he could deliver a manuscript to a publisher in 2012, but if so, it would be late 2012, and it would be published in 2013. It essentially would be fighting the barriers of what's possible for him to do for him to actually get it done in time for a 2012 release date. Another author might do it, but not him and not his thousand-page doorstoppers.
For a non-abandoned fic like HP:MoR, with 76 updates in 22 months, where Eliezer actually has the next chapter completed already and is just trying to do two at once, it will take a catastrophe to keep an update from happening this year. (Hmm. Given the high likelihood of a catastrophe happening, maybe I did guess too high there.)
I still think you are about 5% too high on both of those predictions, but at least you aren't being stupid in arriving at your probabilities.
(By the way, if you are wrong, you've done your future self a service by writing this comment - explaining in detail your reasons is one of the few known effective tactics against hindsight bias.)
A bit off topic, but you seem to be doing this kind of thing a lot: is there any trick for calibrating high-/low-probability events? I can see how to figure out whether my 50% is 50% or 40%, but I'd need to make a lot of predictions to get a statistically useful number of 1% predictions wrong, even if my 1% is really 2% (a serious error!)
Are there any tricks? Base-rates/frequencies (plus Laplace's law) and breaking down conjunctions (#2 and 3 in http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#how-i-make-predictions ).
You can know that your numbers were wrong, if many of the 1-2% predictions become true. But there is no way to find out (by looking at the outcome) whether it was 1% or 2% without several hundred predictions.
Betting time!
Well, unless your or AspiringKnitter's bid-ask spread is too wide.
A 5% difference isn't enough to bet on - I don't make bets that often so gambler's ruin becomes an issue.
Okay, sure. Thank you. Actually, you might be right. Maybe I did fail to consider certain possibilities that could keep those things from happening how I assumed. Of course, that would be evidence in favor of my other prediction: