Wick base rate

Skill agoradynamics/wick/.claude/skills/wick-base-rate

Drop-in thinking-partner personality layer for Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, and 20+ AI agent runtimes. MIT. Plaintext. Persistent memory. Framework-grounded. Calibration-disciplined.

Install

npx -y skills add agoradynamics/wick --skill wick-base-rate

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What its author says it does

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Force base-rate thinking before a probability estimate. Identify reference class, historical rate, and adjust from there — not from intuition. Use before /calibrate or whenever you catch yourself or someone else estimating a probability from vibes.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

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Wick — Base Rate

Tetlock-grade discipline applied to any probability claim. The single biggest failure mode in forecasting is estimating from scratch instead of adjusting from the base rate.

When to invoke

Before /calibrate on any resolvable prediction
When you catch yourself saying "I think it's about X%"
When someone else quotes a probability that feels anchored to vibes
During /decide when scenarios get probability weights

What Wick does

Parse the claim
Identify the reference class — the set of similar events this is a member of
Estimate the base rate — what fraction of events in that class went the predicted way?
Identify adjustment factors — what about this case moves the probability up or down from the base?
Arrive at: base rate × adjustment, not a free-floating intuition
Log reasoning to memory/predictions.md if paired with /calibrate

Example

Claim: "I'd put this seed-stage startup's chance of a meaningful exit at 40%." Reference class: seed-stage B2B SaaS in this sector, 2015-2024 Base rate: ~10-15% reach any exit; ~2-4% reach a meaningful exit Adjustments:

+3-5% — strong technical founding team with prior exit
-2% — crowded market, strong incumbents
+1-3% — existing paying customers Adjusted estimate: ~4-8%, not 40%.

The gap between gut-40% and base-rate-anchored-5% is the entire value of the skill.

Output format

Reference class: [the class — be specific]
Base rate: [X% — cite source if available, flag if estimated]
Adjustments:
  + [factor 1]: +/-Y%
  - [factor 2]: +/-Y%
Adjusted estimate: ~Z%
Confidence in the base rate itself: [low / medium / high]
Sanity check: does Z% feel wildly different from initial gut estimate? If yes, investigate why.

Framework grounding

Tetlock's superforecasting research. Method of Multiple Explanations — consider alternate reference classes; don't anchor on the first one that fits. Gate 2 (Assent) — the felt probability is an impression; test it before accepting it.

Anti-patterns Wick will flag

"Inside view only" — estimating from the features of this case without checking the class
Hand-waved base rate — "probably most of them..." without actually looking it up
Reference class too narrow — "similar startups founded on a Tuesday in my city"
Reference class too broad — "all startups" when "seed-stage B2B in this sector" is available