LESSWRONG
LW

611
Wikitags

Calibration

Edited by Yoav Ravid, gustaf, brook, Jim Fisher, et al. last updated 2nd Apr 2025

Someone is well-calibrated if the things they predict with X% chance of happening in fact occur X% of the time. Importantly, calibration is not the same as accuracy. Calibration is about accurately assessing how good your predictions are, not making good predictions. Person A, whose predictions are marginally better than chance (60% of them come true when choosing from two options) and who is precisely 60% confident in their choices, is perfectly calibrated. In contrast, Person B, who is 99% confident in their predictions, and right 90% of the time, is more accurate than Person A, but less well-calibrated.

See also: Betting, Epistemic Modesty, Forecasting & Prediction

Being well-calibrated has value for rationalists separately from accuracy. Among other things, being well-calibrated lets you make good bets / make good decisions, communicate information helpfully to others if they know you to be well-calibrated (See Group Rationality), and helps prioritize which information is worth acquiring.

Note that all expressions of quantified confidence in beliefs can be well- or poorly- calibrated. For example, calibration applies to whether a person's 95% confidence intervals captures the true outcome 95% of the time.

List of Calibration Exercises
based on this post. Todo: find more & sort & new post for visibility in search engines?

  • WebApp with user created Exercises
  • PDF by CFAR
  • by CFAR
  • based on The Success Equation
  • based on Scout Mindset
  • by Guided Track (Also linked to by 80000 hours and OpenPhil)
  • by Outside the Asylum
  • by Peter Attia
  • by Quantified Intuitions
  • by 2pih

Exercises that are dead/unmaintained

  • https://www.metaculus.com/tutorials (dead link)
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20100529074053/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=129
  • http://credencecalibration.com (dead link)
  • https://calibration.lazdini.lv (dead link)
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20161020032514/http://calibratedprobabilityassessment.org/
  • https://predictionbook.com/credence_games/try (deprecated; see also this Github Issue)
  • https://calibration-training.netlify.app (dead link)
     

 

Subscribe
Discussion
2
Subscribe
Discussion
2
Posts tagged Calibration
76List of Probability Calibration Exercises
Isaac King
4y
12
29Information Charts
Rafael Harth
5y
6
14Anki with Uncertainty: Turn any flashcard deck into a calibration training tool
Sage Future
2y
2
149Use Normal Predictions
Jan Christian Refsgaard
4y
67
120The Sin of Underconfidence
Eliezer Yudkowsky
16y
187
103Calibrate your self-assessments
Scott Alexander
14y
122
36Concrete benefits of making predictions
Jonny Spicer, Sage Future
11mo
5
24I didn't think I'd take the time to build this calibration training game, but with websim it took roughly 30 seconds, so here it is!
mako yass
1y
2
12Calibration Trivia
Screwtape
3y
9
144The Bayesian Tyrant
abramdemski
5y
21
99Giving calibrated time estimates can have social costs
Alex_Altair
3y
16
97Paper: Teaching GPT3 to express uncertainty in words
Ω
Owain_Evans
3y
Ω
7
95Introducing Pastcasting: A tool for forecasting practice
Sage Future
3y
10
71Qualitatively Confused
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
85
62Procrastination Drill
silentbob
2mo
8
Load More (15/70)
Add Posts