Discover more from Overcoming Bias
More evidence that a huge way to improve your accuracy is track records: simply write down your forecasts and check their accuracy later:
In the context of a Super Bowl loss (Study 1), a presidential election (Studies 2 and 3), an important purchase (Study 4), and the consumption of candies (Study 5), individuals mispredicted their affective reactions to these experiences and subsequently misremembered their predictions as more accurate than they actually had been. … This recall error results from people’s tendency to anchor on their current affective state when trying to recall their affective forecasts. Further, those who showed larger recall errors were less likely to learn to adjust their subsequent forecasts and reminding people of their actual forecasts enhanced learning. These results suggest that a failure to accurately recall one’s past predictions contributes to the perpetuation of forecasting errors. (more)
What we need are techs to make it very easy for record our forecasts as we go about our lives, and to review them later for accuracy.
Track Records
In my estimation, the best forecasters seem to be the ones that abstain from forecast until they know that certain topic very well.
Put another way, good forecasting may simply be a matter of good self-appraisal of how confident one can be in one's current knowledge, and knowing when not to make a prediction at all is just as important as knowing what prediction to make.
This seems to have some real truth to it, thanks to self-fulfilling prophecies. If we tend to act upon what we see as foregone conclusions, and thus make them so, it is in our benefit to see success and happiness as a foregone conclusion in cases where it's merely plausible.
I've struggled with depression for quite a while, and one therapist I saw said (in so many words) that depression seems to be over-represented in intelligent, intellectual people. Perhaps there's a very real harm to overcoming bias that we don't properly concern ourselves with, since our mind, though fine with the vague truth, was never equipped to deal with the world bias-free, the same way that our body, though fine with tripping and falling, was never equipped to deal with a high-speed car accident. In this young era of candles in the dark, perhaps the early adopters of freedom from bias are essentially cruising around in an era before the invention of seat belts and air bags.