Most babble that seems to be “predictions” are actually not predictions and, as pointed by Ericf, they do not reflect the internal confidence of the speaker. Sometimes I hear “I am completely sure my favorite team is going to win the championship”, although it is clear that this is not a prediction made by the person, it is his way of saying “I really would like this outcome to happen and that’s my way of signal this”.
“He is not going to die” doesn’t mean “I predict with 90% confidence that he is not going to die” but rather “I wouldn’t like him to die, and even though the unknown real probability may be high, just accepting this may create this reality, so I will say he is not going to die and reality will follow my words, and that’s the power of words, as god said on the bible”.
I really see a lot of people talking about “the power of words”, so they don’t try to truly have accurate beliefs that predict accurately the results on some timestamps, but just uttering the words “may alter reality in a way that they don’t like”, so they just pretend to be high confident on some possible good outcomes because, well, “I am absolutely sure coronavirus will not be that bad”, but hey, “although it was very bad, I am sure everything is going to be fine”. Hey, I am sure we will handle the situation and that there will still be some beds on the hospital for people. Why these fucking words don’t work? Your partner says: don’t give up, I am sure everything is going to be fine.
After all, if Freddy Forecaster says “70% probability” for events that happen only 60% of the time, I know to correct, in mind, Freddy’s forecast- when he says 70%, I know to anticipate that it will actually happen only 60% of the time, and would bet accordingly. So if Peter Pundit says something “certainly” will happen 100 times, and we see 55 of these events actually happen, the next time he says something “certainly” will happen, I would be willing to bet based on his words suggesting a 55% probability.
I agree with you that we should try our best to give our best estimates, and also say our confidence in our estimates, while also creating our historic record of predictions for everyone to calibrate their confidence in our statements. But, for real, every time I see a new pundit, probably this will be the first and also the last time we will be hearing about him. It is hard to have any history of his predictions. It will be very hard to find 100 predictions registered on a platform, and count how many he got it right. And even if such a platform existed with all historic predictions, that also could be gamified in a certain way, e.g, it is easy to predict that the sun will come up tomorrow, and I will win everytime I bet on this. After winning 100⁄100, I try to predict the price of Tesla shares on the next day. Well, even if you used my history of random easy predictions to calibrate your confidence on my hard predictions, that wouldn’t help. Idk, for me it is just ABSOLUTELY hard to calibrate my confidence on the pundits’ statements even if he had put “70%” on the middle of the sentence. Probably he doesn’t even know what he is talking about. And probably we won’t ever have any opportunity to make him to pay rent in anticipated experiences, nor to check any previous hard predictions.
Most babble that seems to be “predictions” are actually not predictions and, as pointed by Ericf, they do not reflect the internal confidence of the speaker. Sometimes I hear “I am completely sure my favorite team is going to win the championship”, although it is clear that this is not a prediction made by the person, it is his way of saying “I really would like this outcome to happen and that’s my way of signal this”.
“He is not going to die” doesn’t mean “I predict with 90% confidence that he is not going to die” but rather “I wouldn’t like him to die, and even though the unknown real probability may be high, just accepting this may create this reality, so I will say he is not going to die and reality will follow my words, and that’s the power of words, as god said on the bible”.
I really see a lot of people talking about “the power of words”, so they don’t try to truly have accurate beliefs that predict accurately the results on some timestamps, but just uttering the words “may alter reality in a way that they don’t like”, so they just pretend to be high confident on some possible good outcomes because, well, “I am absolutely sure coronavirus will not be that bad”, but hey, “although it was very bad, I am sure everything is going to be fine”. Hey, I am sure we will handle the situation and that there will still be some beds on the hospital for people. Why these fucking words don’t work? Your partner says: don’t give up, I am sure everything is going to be fine.
I agree with you that we should try our best to give our best estimates, and also say our confidence in our estimates, while also creating our historic record of predictions for everyone to calibrate their confidence in our statements. But, for real, every time I see a new pundit, probably this will be the first and also the last time we will be hearing about him. It is hard to have any history of his predictions. It will be very hard to find 100 predictions registered on a platform, and count how many he got it right. And even if such a platform existed with all historic predictions, that also could be gamified in a certain way, e.g, it is easy to predict that the sun will come up tomorrow, and I will win everytime I bet on this. After winning 100⁄100, I try to predict the price of Tesla shares on the next day. Well, even if you used my history of random easy predictions to calibrate your confidence on my hard predictions, that wouldn’t help. Idk, for me it is just ABSOLUTELY hard to calibrate my confidence on the pundits’ statements even if he had put “70%” on the middle of the sentence. Probably he doesn’t even know what he is talking about. And probably we won’t ever have any opportunity to make him to pay rent in anticipated experiences, nor to check any previous hard predictions.