I disagree fully. Putting a made up number is not brave, just... foolish. A number always includes "precision": if I say 60% chance, I am suggesting that it's

I disagree fully. Putting a made up number is not brave, just... foolish. A number always includes "precision": if I say 60% chance, I am suggesting that it's between 55% and 65% (or 50%-70%, depending on how you read significant digits). If I say 63%, it signals that I am pretty certain it's in the 62.5%-63.5% range. Sure, even this is sometimes not enough (60% can also be more precise at 59.5%-60.5%), but how many significant digits you use gives you a default error bar too! When we use words like probable and improbable, we have very large error bars. And yes, they are not symmetric, and that's fine too. The article is right that we use this type of language because we don't know actual probabilities, but that's exactly why we don't put numbers on them. There is nothing brave in saying "70-80%" instead of "probable" when that probability is 70%±50% (iow, we might be totally wrong that this is probable; obviously, can't go higher than 1 :).