Scout Mindset Calibration

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About

In Chapter Six of The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef, she discusses the skill of calibration: having the appropriate amount of confidence in your beliefs. This is a tool to automatically score your calibration on the questions from Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset calibration exercise. Please support the author by purchasing The Scout Mindset.

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How to use​

For each question, select an answer and then select how sure you are by circling a confidence level.

 

Since these questions have only two possible answers, your confidence level could range from 50 percent if you truly have no clue (i.e., you might as well be guessing the outcome of a coin flip) to 100 percent if you think there is no chance you could be wrong.

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For the sake of simplicity, there are five confidence levels between those extremes: 55%, 65%, 75%, 85%, and 95%. Just circle the one that best represents how sure you are.

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How to read your results

Being perfectly calibrated would mean that your “50% sure” claims are in fact correct 50 percent of the time, your “60% sure” claims are correct 60 percent of the time, your “70% sure” claims are correct 70 percent of the time, and so on. Perfect calibration is an abstract ideal, not something that’s possible to achieve in reality. Still, it’s a useful benchmark against which to compare yourself.