bentarm comments on [LINK] How to calibrate your confidence intervals - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (7)
I personally like this two player calibration game, which I was introduced to by Paul Christiano at a meetup a couple of years ago:
There's no need to choose a minimum width confidence interval (is there a technical term for that?) e.g. "before 1920" would be an acceptable confidence interval for the question given above.
The big advantage of 50% confidence intervals over 90% confidence intervals (other than that they make a nice easy structure for the game) is that you get much faster feedback. 20 trials can meaningfully tell you that your 50% confidence intervals are off in one direction or the other. 20 trials is enough to tell you if you're overconfident, but it can't tell you if you're underconfident.
The big disadvantage is that 50% confidence intervals somehow don't feel as useful as 90% confidence intervals. I'm not sure this is really true, as there's nothing special about 90% (by my reckoning 50% is about as far away from 90% as 90% is from 98%), but it feels true. Of course, it's pretty trivial to change the game so it works with intervals other than 50%, but you have to play longer, and it gets more complicated.