You are way more fallible than you think

Also... it seems like you're assuming this as background:

Most of us are very much uncalibrated. We give 80%+ chance of success/​completion to the next project even after failing a bunch of similar ones before. Even those of us who are well calibrated are still bad at the margins, where the probability is low (or, equivalently, high). Events we give the odds of 1% to can happen with the frequency of 20%.

And the rest of the post riffs off that. (Like, your examples seem like not "here are examples to convince you you're uncalibrated" but "here are examples of how to deal with the fact that you're uncalibrated" or something.)

But, citation needed.

I'll grant the "most of us". I recall the studies mentioned in HPMOR, along the lines of "you ask people when they're 95% likely to finish only like a quarter finish by then. And you ask when they're 50% likely to finish and it's statistically indistinguishable". I think to (reliably, reproducibly, robustly) get results like that, most of the people in those studies need to be poorly calibrated on the questions they're being asked.

But the "even those of us"? Given that the first two words of the post are "yes, you" - that is, you project extreme confidence that this applies to the reader... how do you know that the reader is bad at the margins even if they're well calibrated elsewhere?

Is this also true of superforecasters? Is it true of the sorts of people who say "man, I really don't know. I think I'd be comfortable buying an implied probability of 0.01% and selling an implied probability of 1%, I know that's a crazy big range but that's where I am"?

(This seems like the sort of extreme confidence that you warn about in this very post. I know you admit to being more fallible than you think, but...)

That's another way to look at it. The usual implicit assumptions break down on the margins. Though, given the odds of this happening (once in a bush, at best, and the flame was not all that glorious), I would bet on hallucinations as a much likelier explanation. Happens to people quite often.

How about historical precedent? Gods did arrive on Spanish ships to South America.

Regarding disbelief of your own senses: As I've commented before: winners of mega lotteries routinely tripple check thier tickets, get 3rd party verification, and even while sitting in thier new mansion will express thier disbelief at winning.

It's a good question. If you ever do, say, project estimates at work, and look back at your track record, most of us would give 99% odds of completion to some project within a given time (well padded to make it that high), and still notice that we go over time and/or over budget way more often than that. There are exceptions, but in general we suck at taking into account long tails.

Uh... because belief feels like truth from the inside, and so you cannot trust the inside view unless you are extremely well calibrated on tiny probabilities? So all you are left with is the outside view. If that is what you are asking.