test please delete

[BrowneIssue]

However, I did not trust my own guess and so used other methods to check my answer. This demonstrates I did have low faith in my guess. Hence, we can also conclude: I have good personal dead-fly-population accuracy awareness.

[BrowneIssue]

So me years back I watch an Open University course entitled "In My Professional Judgement". It was aimed at medical people and was all about knowing how accurate our guesses are.

That is, not how right you are, but how aware you are of your own correctness and how accurate that is.

It was fascinating stuff.

[BrowneIssue]

It should be made compulsory viewing for all young adults, and again when promoted to management.

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There are some broad brush assumptions that arise when the population is analysed in this way. A terrifying one is:

Bad guessers believe they are good guessers.

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The way this is measured is to ask an individual a lot (100 or a number of hundreds) of general knowledge questions. They must range from mind-numbingly easy to simply impossible.

The individual must, for each answer, give their answer and their %age confidence of that answer being correct.

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You then take all the "0% confidence" answers and plot them against how many of them were correct, then the "10% confidence" answers and plot them against what %age were correct up to the "100% confidence" answers.

(This is a slight over simplification, but I'm sure you get the gist.)

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With a good large sample of questions, you should get all your 100% answers right, all your 0% answers wrong and about half your 50% questions right.

But it often doesn't work like that.

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For an over-confident person, the graph goes one way and for an under-confident person, the other. Generally. It can also be skewed toward the middle or to the extremes (usually the thickies that didn't understand the purpose of the test!)

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It is a secondary phenomenon that people that generally get more wrong answers tend to be over-confident in their correctness.

Sadly, it is these buggers that get into management and are successful in politics.

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In a medical context, both under-confidence and over-confidence cause errors and deaths.