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(Note: I don't know if this is the correct place to ask this question, but it's the best-fitting SE site I could find.)

Some time ago I read a marvelous math blog post about how to incorporate certainty into quiz questions, but can't find it now anymore. Concretely how it works is that you say with what probability you think a given statement is true (100% -> certainly; 50% -> no clue; 0% -> certainly not) and then the number of points you get is $\ln(p)$ (or $\ln(1-p)$ if the statement was wrong). This scheme a) incentivizes honesty and b) gives more points if you're more confident in the correct direction.

Google didn't help, because I can't remember the name and also don't know sufficient weirdly specific details about it as that search engines would help. I thought that it was a Summer of Math Exposition (SoME) entry, but apparently not (at least I couldn't find it).

Does someone know what blog post I'm referring to?

Thanks a lot already!

zvavybir
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  • I suspect the phrase is scoring rule and possibly "logarithmic proper scoring rule". There is a slight issue that $\ln(p)$ and $\ln(1-p)$ are negative. There are many blogs about this, including one by Terry Tao – Henry May 18 '23 at 16:27
  • @Henry I don't see how one could use that to make this question scoring I talked about. Note: That $ln(p)$ is negative is not a problem since you can just add an offset to it with out really changing anything (and if you use $ln(2p)$ and $ln(2-2p)$ positive/negative actually exactly correspond to correct/wrong). – zvavybir May 18 '23 at 16:29

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