I don’t have any recommendations on this, but I will warn you that the hard part is NOT finding out the numeric base rate for an easily-identified and well-studied group. The hard part is determine what is the appropriate reference class to use, and then mapping that into the available rates for slight or major variations from your preferred reference class.
When you want to know “how much will smoking this cigar increase my risk of cancer”, it’s very hard to find studies or estimates of people sufficiently similar to you making decisions on that small a scale. You can do some endpointing (find the highest and lowest plausible effect sizes from available groupings, even if you’re not a perfect fit for any of them), and for many choices, this is good enough—even very low estimates of effect may be strong enough to make your choice obvious.
Also, don’t completely discount analysis and inside-view. Your chance of a single ticket winning the lottery is directly calculable, regardless of how other people have fared in other lotteries.
I totally agree with you that the referenceclassproblem is a real problem, but having access to a process for quickly finding accurate base rates is still a problem.
I don’t have any recommendations on this, but I will warn you that the hard part is NOT finding out the numeric base rate for an easily-identified and well-studied group. The hard part is determine what is the appropriate reference class to use, and then mapping that into the available rates for slight or major variations from your preferred reference class.
When you want to know “how much will smoking this cigar increase my risk of cancer”, it’s very hard to find studies or estimates of people sufficiently similar to you making decisions on that small a scale. You can do some endpointing (find the highest and lowest plausible effect sizes from available groupings, even if you’re not a perfect fit for any of them), and for many choices, this is good enough—even very low estimates of effect may be strong enough to make your choice obvious.
Also, don’t completely discount analysis and inside-view. Your chance of a single ticket winning the lottery is directly calculable, regardless of how other people have fared in other lotteries.
I totally agree with you that the reference class problem is a real problem, but having access to a process for quickly finding accurate base rates is still a problem.