Foundational Foundational: build the estimation habit every later exercise relies on.
Calibration

Calibrate Your Confidence

A calibrated forecaster is right about as often as they think they are. Find out where you stand, then fix it.

Two quick quizzes. No prior knowledge required. Honest ranges beat lucky guesses.

Learning Objectives

By the end, you will be able to:

  1. State a 90% confidence interval that captures the truth about 9 times in 10.
  2. Recognize overconfidence in your own estimates.
  3. Explain why calibrated ranges make a Loss Exceedance Curve trustworthy.

What calibration means

When you say you are 90% sure, are you right 90% of the time? Most people are not. They are overconfident: their ranges are too narrow and their "90%" answers are wrong far more than 1 time in 10.

The 90% rule

In the next step you will answer ten trivia questions. You will not give an exact answer. Instead you give a range — a low and a high value — that you are 90% sure contains the true number.

A well-calibrated person captures the true value in about 9 of 10 ranges. Capture far fewer and you are overconfident. Capture all ten with absurdly wide ranges and you are dodging the question.

Then you will answer ten true/false statements and rate your confidence. We compare what you claimed to how often you were right.

Learning Debrief

What You Just Learned

  • A 90% confidence interval should capture the truth about 9 times in 10.
  • Most untrained estimators are overconfident — ranges too narrow.
  • Calibration is trainable: feedback like this is how you improve.

Applying This to Cyber Risk

When you estimate breach costs, downtime, or records exposed, you give ranges. A calibrated range is the difference between a risk model the board can trust and a number you made up.

Loss ranges feed the curve

The Loss Exceedance Curve you build later turns your low/high loss estimates into a probability curve. Overconfident inputs produce a confidently wrong curve.

Calibrate before you quantify

Hubbard's research shows a few rounds of calibration feedback measurably reduces overconfidence. Run this exercise until you reliably hit 9 of 10.

Continue to Fermi Estimates