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I think most people interpret the task of assigning a percentage to their belief of something like this as equivalent to estimating the percentage of the time t
by nojs 6y ago
I think most people interpret the task of assigning a percentage to their belief of something like this as equivalent to estimating the percentage of the time they are likely to be wrong. So to say the two are not related is not true.
- solveit 6y agoI think this attributes overly precise motives to people who have none. It may be accurate for the HN crowd (although I doubt it), but in general, people assigning percentages to their beliefs are performing cargo-cult numeracy rather than actually calibrating beliefs. To illustrate: I am pretty sure that people saying they're 99% sure are saying "I am pretty sure" and not "I estimate I will be wrong once out of a hundred times in situations of comparable certainty".
- MaulingMonkey 6y ago99% is a common number for cargo-cult numeracy, much like "give me a minute" probably doesn't mean a literal minute. On the other hand, 95%, 90%, "give me three minutes", etc. are much less cargo-cult, and much less likely to be cargo-cult numeracy. On the third tentacle, people are bad at a lot of estimates, HN crowd included.