Oh, I hadn’t seen Gwern’s confidence tags. There’s an interesting difference between the Kesselman list that Gwern draws from (screenshotted below) and my proposal above. The Kesselman terms refer to non-overlapping, roughly equal ranges, whereas the climatology usage I give above describe overlapping ranges of different sizes, with one end of the range at 0 or 100%.
Both are certainly useful. I think I’d personally lean toward the climatology version as the better one to adopt, especially for talking about risk; I think in general researchers are less likely to want to say that something is 56-70% likely than that it is 66-100% likely, ie that it’s at least 66% likely. If I were trying to identify a relatively narrow specific range, I think I’d be more inclined to just give an actual approximate number. The climatology version, it seems to me is more primarily for indicating a level of uncertainty. When saying something is ‘likely’ (66-100%) vs ‘very likely’, in both cases you’re saying that you think something will probably happen, but you’re saying different things about your confidence level.
(@gwern I’d love to get your take on that question as well, since you settled on the Kesselman list)
I’ve just posted a quick take getting a bit further into the range of possible things that probabilities can mean; our ways of communicating about probabilities and probability ranges seem hideously inadequate to me.
Oh, I hadn’t seen Gwern’s confidence tags. There’s an interesting difference between the Kesselman list that Gwern draws from (screenshotted below) and my proposal above. The Kesselman terms refer to non-overlapping, roughly equal ranges, whereas the climatology usage I give above describe overlapping ranges of different sizes, with one end of the range at 0 or 100%.
Both are certainly useful. I think I’d personally lean toward the climatology version as the better one to adopt, especially for talking about risk; I think in general researchers are less likely to want to say that something is 56-70% likely than that it is 66-100% likely, ie that it’s at least 66% likely. If I were trying to identify a relatively narrow specific range, I think I’d be more inclined to just give an actual approximate number. The climatology version, it seems to me is more primarily for indicating a level of uncertainty. When saying something is ‘likely’ (66-100%) vs ‘very likely’, in both cases you’re saying that you think something will probably happen, but you’re saying different things about your confidence level.
(@gwern I’d love to get your take on that question as well, since you settled on the Kesselman list)
I’ve just posted a quick take getting a bit further into the range of possible things that probabilities can mean; our ways of communicating about probabilities and probability ranges seem hideously inadequate to me.