Yes, I agree that choice of distribution is often very important to modeling outcomes. If you’re not sure which is most appropriate, you can experiment with different ones as you just did to see whether and how they affect the results. By the way, Guesstimate supports more distributions than the three you mentioned, but the others involve a little more work to incorporate into the model. You can even define your own distributions from sample data that you upload.
Ian David Moss
Karma: 199
We’ve Been Thinking About Measurement All Wrong
This is Why Your Hard Work Sits on the Shelf — and Here’s What to Do About It
An Introduction to Decision Modeling
The Crisis of Evidence Use
Decision-Making for Impact: A Guide
To Be Decided #1
A Short Introduction to Theory of Change
To Be Decided #2
This mostly made sense to me, but what is the surprising information that caused you to update in favor of Trump being reelected? Presumably some piece of economic news? Or did I misunderstand your last sentence?
To Be Decided #3
On Stories vs. Data
That’s a good idea, I’ll have to figure out how to do that! :)
To Be Decided #4
FYI, this is now set up: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/tXiWcokm9tpy8uApN
Whoops! It is not. Here’s the correct one, and I’ll make the change in the post as well. Thanks for the correction and the kind words!