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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29684 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Even using verbal categories like low, medium and high probability, especially when making a group decision aren’t precise enough to communicate what I’m actually thinking. Low is how low? For you it might be 5%, for me it’s 20%. We can’t communicate that well if we don’t know what the terms are.

I think part of the point is the numerical values convey an unwarranted degree of precision based on the process that generated them. Say your estimate is 20% probability for X. Why not 21%? 19%? 25%? 15%? What's the size of the error term on your estimate? Is your forecasting of this outcome so good as to warrant a <1% margin? Of course, estimation of that error term itself has the same problems as generating the initial estimate.

I don't think this is a good objection. Numbers are often approximate. 20% means 'somewhere between 10% and 30%' as much as 'around a hundred pounds' might mean '75-125 pounds'. On the other hand, I usually think it's better to actually say what ideas and conditionals inform your judgement rather than just saying a number, and I'm not sure what the number adds to the former.

The numbers at least for me give me a ballpark estimate of what I think will actually happen given a certain set of conditions. If I say 25% (which in my mind is generally within 10% of the number I give) that communicates in a way that “low probability” doesn’t because “low” doesn’t mean anything. My low might be 25%, your low might be 5%. And making decisions, in a group setting especially, requires precision so that when weighing options you can know with some degree of certainty what people think are likely and unlikely and to what degree. This allows you to discuss whether an X% (+/-10%) risk of something happening being serious enough to make that decision a bad idea. If low can mean anything between 5% and 35%, it’s going to cause people to either overestimate the risk and be too cautious, or underestimate it and take risks that they might not take otherwise.

My point is that it's important to make that uncertainty explicit because not everyone talking to you is going to understand that. Maybe you think 20% is shorthand for 10-30% but someone else thinks it's precisely 20% or is actually 15-25% or some other range. I think the "around a hundred pounds" is a good example because "around" conveys a degree of uncertainty on the "hundred pounds." If I was quoted a price of some good at "a hundred pounds" (no "around") and later found out it was actually 125 I would feel like I was deceived.

Probability already inherently indicates uncertainty though! You can just say you're combining the different 'levels' of uncertainty (what that means is debatable), and the average of [10..30] is 20.

But the average of [5..35] and [0..40] are also 20. Do you think all three of these ranges are conveying the same information because their average is 20? I don't.

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