Is confidence in predictions a good thing or a bad thing?

Polars.io
3 min readJan 16, 2023

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Confidence can come and go with some players, and it often affects how they make predictions. Some see confidence as integral to success, while others believe it can interfere with the decision-making process.

This article analyzes whether certainty is a good or bad thing in predicting events.

Experts in many sports often cite confidence as a key factor in a player’s or team’s success. While we can agree that confidence can help improve performance, its absence can lead to poorer results. While it is difficult to determine the extent to which confidence affects results, it is important to understand why it can affect not only athletes, but also people who earn money from sporting events.

How can certainty help in prediction?

Most punters who have had consistent success will tell you that this is the result of hard work. In addition to working and acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to consistently make money in the prediction market, you will also need some luck and a fair amount of patience to see it through.

While confidence won’t necessarily get you any of these things, it can help you find motivation and persistence when you start to doubt yourself or your process.

Confidence in your strengths or the capabilities of your model will help you keep working on improving and trying new things. Confidence alone will never be enough, and eventually careful testing and evaluation of results will show you how well you make predictions. But confidence will certainly help you deal with the fickleness and inevitable losses that happen along the way.

If you want to make a career in forecasting and make enough money, you will probably have to risk a lot of money. It is important that you never risk more money than you can afford to lose, but you must also be confident enough in yourself and your strategy to be able to part with that money.

Influence of self-confidence in prediction

Obviously, confidence can have a positive effect on players and our ability to make good decisions when predicting events. However, there are some dangers that can be caused by confidence. The most obvious of these is overconfidence.

Self-confidence is the product of illusory superiority and, as the name implies, leads to overconfidence in one’s skills or judgment. In other words, we overestimate our own actions or our actions in comparison to others. Simply put, overconfidence means that we think we are better than we really are.

Many players will risk their money based on their perception of their predictive abilities, with limited analysis to back it up. For these and many other players, overestimating their ability to predict future outcomes will obviously be a costly mistake.

If losses accumulate, but you continue to act with the same approach, driven by the belief that you are right and that you have just been the victim of failure, the losses will only continue.

Self-confidence and our perception of others

Overconfidence and its effect on forecasting decisions is one thing, but it is equally harmful when it affects our perception of the abilities of others. It can distort our understanding of the level of competition in the forecasting market.

If you are too confident in your own abilities and underestimate the abilities of others, you underestimate how difficult it is to get into the small percentage of successful players. If you think you are better than others, it can not only affect your thinking and work ethic, but also lead to missed opportunities and poor decisions.

Conclusion

What events you are involved in and how much money you are willing to invest will influence your level of confidence in yourself and others. Too much confidence in yourself or in what you are predicting can be very dangerous for those who hope to achieve long-term success.

Conversely, overconfidence in the possibilities of the prediction market will lead to uncertainty, and you will have difficulty finding sufficient value or making the right choices to succeed.

Polars

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