To the best of my knowledge, human brain is a simulation machine. It unconsciously making prediction about what sensory input it should expect. This include the higher level input, like language and even concepts. This is the basic mechanism underlying surprise and similar emotion. Moreover, it only makes simulation on the things it cares about and filter the rest.
Given this, I would think that most of your prediction is obsolete, because we are doing this unconsciously. Example:
You predict you will finish the task one week early. But you are ended up finishing one day early. You are not surprised. But if you ended up finishing one day late, then you would be surprised. When people are surprised by the same trigger often enough, most normal people I presume, will update their believe. I know this is related to planning fallacy, but I think my arguments still hold water.
You post a post on Facebook. You didn’t make any conscious prediction on the reaction of the audience. You got one million likes. I bet you will be surprised and scratching your mind about why and how you could get such reaction.
Otherwise, I still see some value in what you are doing, but not because of prediction per se, but because you it effectively mitigate bias. For example. “Predict how well you understand someone’s position by trying to paraphrase it back to him.” It addresses illusion of transparency. But I think there is not much more value in making prediction rather than simply making a habit to paraphrase more often than otherwise without making prediction.
Making conscious prediction, on top of the unconscious one, is cognitively costly. I do think it might improve one’s calibration and accuracy and is superior to the improvement made by the surprise mechanism alone. However, the question is, is the calibration and accuracy improvement worth the extra cognitive cost?
To the best of my knowledge, human brain is a simulation machine. It unconsciously making prediction about what sensory input it should expect. This include the higher level input, like language and even concepts. This is the basic mechanism underlying surprise and similar emotion. Moreover, it only makes simulation on the things it cares about and filter the rest.
Given this, I would think that most of your prediction is obsolete, because we are doing this unconsciously. Example:
You predict you will finish the task one week early. But you are ended up finishing one day early. You are not surprised. But if you ended up finishing one day late, then you would be surprised. When people are surprised by the same trigger often enough, most normal people I presume, will update their believe. I know this is related to planning fallacy, but I think my arguments still hold water.
You post a post on Facebook. You didn’t make any conscious prediction on the reaction of the audience. You got one million likes. I bet you will be surprised and scratching your mind about why and how you could get such reaction.
Otherwise, I still see some value in what you are doing, but not because of prediction per se, but because you it effectively mitigate bias. For example. “Predict how well you understand someone’s position by trying to paraphrase it back to him.” It addresses illusion of transparency. But I think there is not much more value in making prediction rather than simply making a habit to paraphrase more often than otherwise without making prediction.
Making conscious prediction, on top of the unconscious one, is cognitively costly. I do think it might improve one’s calibration and accuracy and is superior to the improvement made by the surprise mechanism alone. However, the question is, is the calibration and accuracy improvement worth the extra cognitive cost?