[stonewareslord]

What do you mean? Adding odds defeats the purpose of the prediction since you can't confirm it to be true or not.

If I predict with 99.99% odds something will happen and it doesn't, my prediction could still have been correct as that fits in the remaining .01%. Whereas if I predict something will or won't happen after some time, you can confirm if it did or didn't happen after that time.

[kqr]

All predictions come with uncertainty. That's what makes them predictions.

Even if someone says "there will be an ice cream shortage in France in the summer of 2025" they don't mean they are 100 % certain of it. They mean they find it somewhat likely -- but exactly how likely? That's what they have to tell us, because we don't know.

For an individual prediction, you can never tell whether it's true or not, because individual predictions always come with some level of uncertainty.

What you can do, if you know at what confidence level it was made, is

- Score individual predictions. One made at 99.9 % certainty that doesn't come true gets a heavy negative score, while if it would have been made at 60 % it gets penalised much less.

- Verify the accuracy of a collection of predictions. If I predict five things at confidence levels of 0.8 0.7 0.9 0.5 0.5 then I should get roughly 3--4 of them right. If I don't, my predictions aren't very accurate.