In particular, meteorologists are known to have a “wet bias” – they forecast rain more often than it actually occurs.
This seems to be very interesting: is the wet bias a marketing ploy that makes people feel the information is more valuable? Or is it an optimisation because people prefer to prepare for rain and then it not rain than vice versa? I think there’s room for a lot of probability fudging to match intuitive human expectations, just because we are not very good at understanding probability. One example is that if it predicted a 90% chance of sun and it rained I would be very upset, even though this is perfectly within their prediction.
Forecasters deliberately overstate the probablity of rain, following the apparent user preferences. Most people are poorly calibrated to the point of only explicitly noticing “rained without prediction”, and the cost asymmetry points in the same direction.
Making things more complicated is that in many cities it can be raining in one suburb and dry in another, and accurately communicating such spatial heterogeneity is almost as difficult as forecasting it.
This seems to be very interesting: is the wet bias a marketing ploy that makes people feel the information is more valuable? Or is it an optimisation because people prefer to prepare for rain and then it not rain than vice versa? I think there’s room for a lot of probability fudging to match intuitive human expectations, just because we are not very good at understanding probability. One example is that if it predicted a 90% chance of sun and it rained I would be very upset, even though this is perfectly within their prediction.
Forecasters deliberately overstate the probablity of rain, following the apparent user preferences. Most people are poorly calibrated to the point of only explicitly noticing “rained without prediction”, and the cost asymmetry points in the same direction.
Making things more complicated is that in many cities it can be raining in one suburb and dry in another, and accurately communicating such spatial heterogeneity is almost as difficult as forecasting it.