JoachimSchipper comments on New Year's Prediction Thread (2012) - Less Wrong
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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.