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RobinHanson comments on Test Your Rationality - Less Wrong
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Yes calibration tests are rationality tests, but they are better tests on subjects where you are less likely to be rational. So what are the best subjects on which to test your calibration?
I suspect I should also be writing down calibrated probability estimates for my project completion dates. This calibration test is easy to do oneself, without infrastructure, but I'd still be interested in a website tabulating my and others' early predictions and then our actual performance -- perhaps a page within LW?. Might be especially good to know about people within a group of coworkers, who could perhaps then know how much to actually estimate timelines when planning or dividing complex projects.
Wouldn't making a probability estimate for your project completion dates influence your date of completion? Predicting your completion times successfully won't prove your rationality.
This is a good point. Still, it would provide evidence of rationality, especially in the likely majority of cases where people didn't try to game the system by e.g. deliberately picking dates far in advance of their actual completions, and then doing the last steps right at that date. My calibration scores on trivia have been fine for awhile now, but my calibration at predicting my own project completions is terrible.
I wonder to what degree this is a problem of poor calibration vs. poor motivation. Maybe commitment mechanisms like Stikk.com would have a greater marginal benefit than better calibration. I don't know about you, but that seems to be the case with regards to similar issues on my end.
Perhaps we could make a procedure for asking your friends, coworkers, and other acquaintance (all mixed together) to rate you on various traits, and anonymizing who submitted which rating to encourage honesty? You could then submit calibrated probability estimates as to what ratings were given.
I'd find this a harder context in which to be rational than I'd find trivia.
Actually, there's probably some website out there already that lets one solicit anonymous feedback. (Which would be a rationality boost for some of us in itself, even apart from calibration -- though I'd like to try calibration on it, too.)
Does anybody know of such a site? I spent an hour looking on Google -- perhaps not with the right keywords -- and found only What Others Think, Kumquat, and a couple Facebook/Myspace apps.
Both look potentially worth using, but neither is ideal. Are there other competitors?