PredictionBook.com—Track your calibration

Our hosts at Tricycle Developments have created PredictionBook.com, which lets you make predictions and then track your calibration—see whether things you assigned a 70% probability happen 7 times out of 10.

The major challenge with a tool like this is (a) coming up with good short-term predictions to track (b) maintaining your will to keep on tracking yourself even if the results are discouraging, as they probably will be.

I think the main motivation to actually use it, would be rationalists challenging each other to put a prediction on the record and track the results—I’m going to try to remember to do this the next time Michael Vassar says “X%” and I assign a different probability. (Vassar would have won quite a few points for his superior predictions of Singularity Summit 2009 attendance—I was pessimistic, Vassar was accurate.)