roughly 50% likely to be true or false
I feel like you'd need to specify for what kind of person these statements shall appear about 50% likely. That can be very different across different knowledge backgrounds. I, as a European, have no idea whether or not Iowa and Ohio are neighboring states.
That said, I think geographical questions might do well because such statements should be easy to generate and find evidence for/against.
Examples:
(some of these are false, some are true).
To create these statements, one could look up wikipedia lists, e.g.List of islands by area, List of countries by area, List of rivers by length and so on.
Writing a script that extracts statements from this type of data should be feasible, and one could write it such that for each true statement extracted, a wrong statement is created as well.
I find it very hard to judge these questions, however given a world map (without borders) this changes. Also, you could tell me how many people live in the countries/states mentioned, how large one of this countries is in absolute numbers or what the greatest depth of the Great Slave Lake and fifteen other lakes in the world is.
Once these statements are available, they could not only be used for calibration training, but also for exercises about seeking the truth in groups.
USGS has good info.
http://www.usgs.gov/ http://cegis.usgs.gov/ontology.html
http://dbpedia.org/About Also there is no need to scrape wikipedia, work has been done for you. You can do sparql queries to get most of your statements and the CEGIS site supposedly has a working sparql endpoint but I haven't used that in years.
Does anybody know where to find a large database of statements that are roughly 50% likely to be true or false? These would be used for confidence calibration / Bayesian updating exercises for CMR/HRP.
One way to make such a database would be to buy a bunch of trivia games with True/False questions, and type each statement and its negation into a computer. A problem with this might be that trivia questions are selected to have surprising/counterintuitive truth values; I'm not sure if that's true. I'd be happy to acquire an already-made database of this form, but ideally I'd like statements that are "more neutral" in terms of how counterintuitive they are.
Any thoughts on where we might find a database like this to use/buy?
Thanks for any help!
Revision: We actually want a database of two-choice answer questions. This way, the player won't get trained on a base rate of 50% of statements in the world being true... they'll just get trained that when there are two possible answers, one is always true. In the end, the database should look something like this (warning: I made up the "correct" answers):
Question: "Which is diagnosed more often in America (2011)?";
Answers: (a) "the cold", (b) allergies";
Correct Answer: (a);
Tags: {medical}
Question: "Which city has a higher average altitude?";
Answers: (a) "Chicago", (b) "Las Vegas";
Correct Answer: (a)
Tags: {geography}
Question: "Who sold more albums while living"?;
Answers: (a) "Michael Jackson", (b) "Elvis Presley";
Correct Answer: (b)
Tags: {history, pop-culture, music}
Question: "Was the price of IBM stock higher or lower at the start of the month after the Berlin wall fell, compared with the start of the previous month?";
Answers: (a) "higher", (b) "lower";
Correct Answer: (a)
Tags: {history, finance}