I’ve tried to take the ‘outside view’ on this, to see if I’d originally come up with the idea of using bits, whether it would be worth switching to decibels. Using decibels, only two digits brings you all the way to the billions-to-one level of odds, which seems sufficient for everyday purposes; and decibels dividing probability-space more finely allows for easy differentiation between some useful probability numbers, such as ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ and ‘clear and convincing evidence’, which would be blurred if using bits.
So I think that I’m going to keep bei’e as being measured in decibels, add a note to the definition about conversion to bits… and, I think, add a note that anyone who really wants to have an experimental cmavo that uses bits is as free to create and use it as I was to create bei’e. Sound good to you?
I’ve tried to take the ‘outside view’ on this, to see if I’d originally come up with the idea of using bits, whether it would be worth switching to decibels. Using decibels, only two digits brings you all the way to the billions-to-one level of odds, which seems sufficient for everyday purposes; and decibels dividing probability-space more finely allows for easy differentiation between some useful probability numbers, such as ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ and ‘clear and convincing evidence’, which would be blurred if using bits.
So I think that I’m going to keep bei’e as being measured in decibels, add a note to the definition about conversion to bits… and, I think, add a note that anyone who really wants to have an experimental cmavo that uses bits is as free to create and use it as I was to create bei’e. Sound good to you?
sure why not.
I just find bits more natural. People talk about twice as much (+1 bit) often, and bits are the unit used in information theory and computer science.