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matt comments on How to come up with verbal probabilities - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
I keep track: pbook.trike.com.au
I find that my casual estimates of probability often change dramatically as I pause to type something into my permanent PredictionBook record.
(We're almost ready to go live, but as the front page suggests this is still in beta. We're currently updating the styling to work in Internet Explorer (so until then consider using a good browser instead). We'd love your feedback, so please use the "feedback" tab on the right. When we do go live we'll keep any accounts and data from the beta, so you won't lose anything by signing up now.)
That's an interesting site. May I make a suggestion?
Since a year or two ago when someone suggested on OB that tracking predictions would be good for your mental health, I've pondered how one could do that with software. The problem is that the things where prediction tracking delivers day-to-day bacon - such as whether I'll like the vanilla or chocolate better, or which route to work will be faster - are also so minor that no one would bother writing them down and later inputting them to some website/program. The friction/overhead is just way too high.
But I've been looking at twitter, and it seems to me, that maybe if your cellphone is on and all you have to do is type up the prediction and % and hit enter, maybe that's lightweight enough to make it a habit. What do you guys think?
Agreed. Tweet it, or email it, or SMS it, or enter it into the iPhone app, or use the method that we didn't think of, but that some other hacker was able to put together using our API. Alternative input methods are high on our todo list.
I'm curious, has anyone attempted to put a dollar amount to the developer time spent making things work in IE?
ETA: for Bayesian practice, I'll put my 98% bars at...$1000/yr and $200000000/yr
Define wasted - I assume people generally put effort into making things work in IE because they expect to increase their audience as a direct result. For a profit making enterprise anyone investing time in making things work in IE is presumably doing so under the expectation that it will deliver a positive return. For a non-profit making enterprise the expectation is presumably that the increased audience is worth the expenditure based on whatever measure is used for the value of a larger audience.
Is your claim that people in fact consistently overestimate the return on investment for ensuring compatibility with IE? Or that relative to some hypothetical global optimum money is 'wasted'? If the latter, how would you attempt to evaluate the waste?
I'm sorry, that was unclear.
What I intended by the word was simply that from an aggregate perspective, the optimal solution would be everyone, as matt said, using a good browser instead, which would require minimal effort by users, and make the time investment from developers unnecessary.
Still, I've edited to the more neutral spent.
ETA: I suppose if you wanted to put a dollar value to "time wasted", you would have to subtract off the dollar value of the time it would take for each present-day IE user to download Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, etc, import any bookmarks, and become familiar with its workings up to the level at which they were previously proficient in IE. This amount is non-negligible, and I was wrong to overlook it, but I strongly doubt that it is of the same order as the developer-time spent.
Does that include a dollar value assigned to volunteered coding time, or no?
Excellent question -- I'd include the dollar value of whatever work the individual could have been doing, yes.
I would assign much lower odds to the chances of it being less than $1000/yr worldwide, since I have personally done more than a day's work on it in the last 12 months and our daily chargeable rate is higher than that.