> The percentages thing was what made me realise this. When I talk to highly intelligent people, I use percentages to estimate probabilities. When I talk to typ

> The percentages thing was what made me realise this. When I talk to highly intelligent people, I use percentages to estimate probabilities. When I talk to typical people in a normal workplace setting, I dumb it down a bit and avoid using numbers. I've noticed that average people don't like percentages and it confuses and even angers them. 10% of people are comfortable with comments phrased as my comment here is, using percentages as a quick shorthand for communicating gut intuitions and suspicions about complex subjects. When on similar intellectual footing as the interlocutor, they can easy distinguish numbers invented on the spot to communicate intuitions from serious claims about the data. Nobody in this 10% would make the mistake of thinking that I assert 10% to be the real number. 10% is too round and generic, if I claimed 9.7% then things would be different but "10%" obviously isn't meant to be taken literally. 90% of people balk at this imprecise rhetorical use percentages because they're pretty sure the person doing it is trying to pull a fast one, fabricating data out of nothing to make themself sound authoritative.