At the start of Chapter 6 in the precipice, Ord writes:
To do so, we need to quantify the risks. People are often reluctant to put numbers on catastrophic risks, preferring qualitative language, such as “improbable” or “highly unlikely.” But this brings serious problems that prevent clear communication and understanding. Most importantly, these phrases are extremely ambiguous, triggering different impressions in different readers. For instance, “highly unlikely” is interpreted by some as one in four, but by others as one in 50. So much of one’s work in accurately assessing the size of each risk is thus immediately wasted. Furthermore, the meanings of these phrases shift with the stakes: “highly unlikely” suggests “small enough that we can set it aside,” rather than neutrally referring to a level of probability. This causes problems when talking about high-stakes risks, where even small probabilities can be very important. And finally, numbers are indispensable if we are to reason clearly about the comparative sizes of different risks, or classes of risks.
This made me recall hearing about Matsés, a language spoken by an indigenous tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, that has the (apparently) unusual feature of using verb conjugations to indicate the certainty of information being provided in a sentence. From an article on Nautilus:
In Nuevo San Juan, Peru, the Matsés people speak with what seems to be great care, making sure that every single piece of information they communicate is true as far as they know at the time of speaking. Each uttered sentence follows a different verb form depending on how you know the information you are imparting, and when you last knew it to be true.
...
The language has a huge array of specific terms for information such as facts that have been inferred in the recent and distant past, conjectures about different points in the past, and information that is being recounted as a memory. Linguist David Fleck, at Rice University, wrote his doctoral thesis on the grammar of Matsés. He says that what distinguishes Matsés from other languages that require speakers to give evidence for what they are saying is that Matsés has one set of verb endings for the source of the knowledge and another, separate way of conveying how true, or valid the information is, and how certain they are about it. Interestingly, there is no way of denoting that a piece of information is hearsay, myth, or history. Instead, speakers impart this kind of information as a quote, or else as being information that was inferred within the recent past.
I doubt the Matsés spend much time talking about existential risk, but their language could provide an interesting example of how to more effectively convey aspects of certainty, probability and evidence in natural language.
According to Fleck’s thesis, Matsés has nine past tense conjugations, each of which express the source of information (direct experience, inference, or conjecture) as well as how far in the past it was (recent past, distant past, or remote past). Hearsay and history/mythology are also marked in a distinctive way. For expressing certainty, Matsés has a particle ada/-da and a verb suffix -chit which mean something like “perhaps” and another particle, ba, that means something like “I doubt that...” Unfortunately for us, this doesn’t seem more expressive than what English speakers typically say. I’ve only read a small fraction of Fleck’s 1279-page thesis so it’s possible that I missed something. I wrote a lengthier description of the evidential and epistemic modality system in Matsés at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MYCbguxHAZkNGtG2B/matses-are-languages-providing-epistemic-certainty-of?commentId=yYtEWoHQEFuWCehWt.
At the start of Chapter 6 in the precipice, Ord writes:
This made me recall hearing about Matsés, a language spoken by an indigenous tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, that has the (apparently) unusual feature of using verb conjugations to indicate the certainty of information being provided in a sentence. From an article on Nautilus:
I doubt the Matsés spend much time talking about existential risk, but their language could provide an interesting example of how to more effectively convey aspects of certainty, probability and evidence in natural language.
According to Fleck’s thesis, Matsés has nine past tense conjugations, each of which express the source of information (direct experience, inference, or conjecture) as well as how far in the past it was (recent past, distant past, or remote past). Hearsay and history/mythology are also marked in a distinctive way. For expressing certainty, Matsés has a particle ada/-da and a verb suffix -chit which mean something like “perhaps” and another particle, ba, that means something like “I doubt that...” Unfortunately for us, this doesn’t seem more expressive than what English speakers typically say. I’ve only read a small fraction of Fleck’s 1279-page thesis so it’s possible that I missed something. I wrote a lengthier description of the evidential and epistemic modality system in Matsés at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MYCbguxHAZkNGtG2B/matses-are-languages-providing-epistemic-certainty-of?commentId=yYtEWoHQEFuWCehWt.