1001 PredictionBook Nights

gwern

I explain what I've learned from creating and judging thousands of predictions on personal and real-world matters: the challenges of maintenance, the limitations of prediction markets, the interesting applications to my other essays, skepticism about pundits and unreflective persons' opinions, my own biases like optimism & planning fallacy, 3 very useful heuristics/approaches, and the costs of these activities in general.

Plus an extremely geeky parody of Fate/Stay Night.

This essay exists as a large section of my page on predictions markets on gwern.net: http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#1001-predictionbook-nights

I explain what I've learned from creating and judging thousands of predictions on personal and real-world matters: the challenges of maintenance, the limitations of prediction markets, the interesting applications to my other essays, skepticism about pundits and unreflective persons' opinions, my own biases like optimism & planning fallacy, 3 very useful heuristics/approaches, and the costs of these activities in general.

Plus an extremely geeky parody of Fate/Stay Night.

This essay exists as a large section of my page on predictions markets on gwern.net: http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#1001-predictionbook-nights

This detachment itself seems to help accuracy; I was struck by a psychology study demonstrating that not only are people better at falsifying theories put forth by other people, they are better at falsifying when pretending it is held by an imaginary friend!

I think we've just derived a new heuristic. Pretend that your beliefs are held by your imaginary friend.

An explanation of why this works.

Short version: suppose that reasoning in the sense of "consciously studying the premises of conclusions and evaluating them, as well as generating consciously understood chains of inference" evolved mainly to persuade others of your views. Then it's only to be expected that we will only study and generate theories at a superficial level by default, because there's no reason to waste time evaluating our conscious justifications if they aren't going to be used for anything. If we do expect them to be subjected to cl... (read more)

11gwern15y

I agree. When I first read the essay, I went to myself so that is why 'rubber-duck debugging' works!

0lessdazed15y

Does falsification improve if I imagine they are the beliefs of the imaginary friend of an imaginary friend?

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