4 ms·
I 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 assign
by solveit 5y ago
I 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 5y 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.