4 ms·
The amount of bullshit hail mary percentage figures in this article were too much to get through, had to stop reading. If you simply think something will be mor
by goldenkey 9y ago
The amount of bullshit hail mary percentage figures in this article were too much to get through, had to stop reading. If you simply think something will be more likely to succeed than not..then just say that..don't say 60% chance when your precision of prediction is a toggle between, fail, might be ok, might be mildly successful, or will probably succeed. When qualitatives become quantitative because of pedantic microscopy, there is a problem..
- gwern 9y agoWith practice, it's easy to make meaningful predictions down to that granularity. For example, Tetlock finds that with the superforecasters in GJP, their exact percentages are important enough that merely rounding to the nearest 5% or so makes their overall performance significantly worse. (This isn't so mysterious if you think of it in terms of frequencies: predicting a NK nuke test at 5% rather than 10% may seem specious at first, but surely there is a big difference subjectively between 'every 20 years' and 'every 10 years'?)