On semi-useful retrodiction

The main idea: poll knowledgeable parties on the probability of past events within basic logical rules.   

0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 05.07.2023, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form. 


1.1 Here’s a system that may be able to produce semi-useful probability estimates for past events.

1.2 Create a list of 10 - 20 past events, which include a combination of events that did and did not happen (ex. Germany to conquer France within 1940, Soviets to reach the moon first, etc.).

1.3 Ask a group of knowledgeable people to (independently of one-another) assign a probability to each event, assuming each event had a random chance of happening or not. Feel free to enforce logical rules if events are conditional upon one-another (ex. chance of Germans conquering France within 1940 must be lower than their chance of conquering France within September 1940). 

1.4 The probabilities given by each participant for the slate of events must be such as to, when summed, round up or down to the number of events that actually happened. 

1.5 Share the distribution of probabilities given by the group for each event, and ask for a final submission.

1.6 Hopefully, what you have is a reasonable assessment of the probability of those events, in the form of the group’s median, or by using some other aggregation mechanism. Obvious uses present themselves in the form of business planning and history. 


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