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Morendil comments on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) - LessWrong
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I really, really want to answer "shortly" and leave it at that.
But since you ask, 45% chance I'll do it tomorrow, 25% over the week-end, 10% monday, and 20% later than monday.
Predictions involving what I'm gonna do are trickier for me, because there's a feedback loop between the act of making a prediction, and my likelihood of taking the corresponding actions once the prediction has turned them into a public commitment; it's a complicated one which sometimes triggers procrastination, sometimes increased motivation.
Thanks. Your prediction is now recorded on PredictionBook.
I hope you don't take it personally, but my estimate that you'll have the essay ready by tomorrow is lower than yours. Even those who, like Kahneman, know that the inside view yields overoptimistic estimates in cases of this sort tend to rely on it more than they should.
Of course, the fact that I'm making this prediction might also enter into the feedback loop you describe. I suspect the overall effect is that your prediction is now more likely to be true as a consequence of my having publicly given a lower estimate than you did.
Congrats!
By the way, when you say "I really, really want to answer 'shortly'", is this just because you sometimes dislike giving precise estimates, or do you think there is sometimes a rational justification for this reluctance? Without having thought about the matter carefully, it seems to me that the only valid reason for abstaining from giving precise estimates is that one's audience might make assumptions about the reliability of the estimate from the fact that it is expressed in precise language (more precision suggests higher reliability). But provided one gives independent reliability measures (by e.g. being explicit about one's confidence intervals), can this reluctance still be justified?
It's because it's now 3am and I've stuck a knife in the back of my tomorrow-self, who will wake up sleep deprived, so that my present-self (with a 1500 word first draft completed) can enjoy the certainty of hitting an estimate which was only that, not a commitment. Hyperbolic discounting is a royal pain.
It's because I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, as are many of my colleagues working in software development. :-/