(Forthcoming in Psychology Today) THE TL;DR KEY POINTS
PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATION: WHAT IS CALIBRATION AND CALIBRATIONISM? As I mentioned elsewhere, I recently published a paper arguing for calibrationism, the idea that judgments of probability are trustworthy only if there’s evidence they are produced in ways that are calibrated—that is, only if there is evidence that the things one assigns probabilities of, say, 90% to happen approximately 90% of the time. Below is an example of such evidence; it is a graph which depicts the calibration of a forecaster from the Good Judgment project—user 3559: The graph shows how often the things they assign probabilities to turn out to be true. For example, the top right dot represents all the unique events which they assigned a probability of around 97.5% to before they did or didn’t occur: that Mozambique would experience an onset of insurgency between October 2013 and March 2014, that France would deliver a Mistral-class ship to a particular country before January 1st, 2015 and so on for 17 other events. Now, out of all of these 19 events which they assigned a probability of about 97%, it turns out that about 95% of those events occurred. Likewise, if you look at all the events this person assigned a probability of approximately 0%, it turns out that about 0% of those events occurred.
However, not all people are like this, below is a particular individual, user 4566, who assigned probabilities of around 97% to things which were true merely 21% of time, such as Chad experiencing insurgency by March 2014 and so on.
0 Comments
(Forthcoming in Psychology Today) THE TL;DR KEY POINTS
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUSTWORTHY JUDGMENTS
We all make judgments of probability and depend on them for our decision-making. However, it is not always obvious which judgments to trust, especially since a range of studies suggest these judgments can sometimes be more inaccurate than we might hope or expect. For example, scholars have argued at least 4% of death sentence convictions in the US are false convictions, that tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans die of misdiagnoses each year and that sometimes experts can be 100% sure of predictions which turn out to be false 19% of the time. So we want trustworthy judgments, or else bad outcomes can occur. How do, then, can we determine which judgments to trust—either from ourselves or others? In a paper recently published here and freely available here, I argue for an answer called “inclusive calibrationism”—or just “calibrationism” for short. Calibrationism says trustworthiness requires two ingredients—calibration and inclusivity. |
AuthorJohn Wilcox Archives
September 2024
Categories
All
|