A lot of EA writing contains many hedging statements (along the lines of “I’m uncertain about this, but”, “my best guess is”, “this is potentially a good idea”, “it might be good”, “I’m tentatively going to say”,”I’m not confident in this assertion, but”,”I’m unsure of the level of support/evidence base for this” etc).
To make things more concise, perhaps [ha!] a shorthand could be developed, where (rough) probabilities are given for statements. Maybe [haha] it could take the form of a subscript with a number, with the statements bounded by apostrophes (’), except the apostrophes are also subscript. To be as minimal as possible, the numbers could be [lol] written as 9 for 0.9 of 90%, 75 for 0.75 or 75%, 05 for 0.05 or 5%, 001 for 0.001 or 0.1% etc (basically just taking the decimal probability and omitting the decimal point). Footnotes could be added for explanations where appropriate.
Maybe the statements (or numbers) could be colour coded for ease of spotting whether something is regarded as highly likely or highly unlikely, or somewhere in the middle. Although maybe all of this will disrupt the flow of reading too much?
The problem with these is having everyone on the same page of what the words mean. I recall Toby Ord not liking the IPCC’s use of them in The Precipice for this reason.
Shorthand for hedging statements?
A lot of EA writing contains many hedging statements (along the lines of “I’m uncertain about this, but”, “my best guess is”, “this is potentially a good idea”, “it might be good”, “I’m tentatively going to say”,”I’m not confident in this assertion, but”,”I’m unsure of the level of support/evidence base for this” etc).
To make things more concise, perhaps [ha!] a shorthand could be developed, where (rough) probabilities are given for statements. Maybe [haha] it could take the form of a subscript with a number, with the statements bounded by apostrophes (’), except the apostrophes are also subscript. To be as minimal as possible, the numbers could be [lol] written as 9 for 0.9 of 90%, 75 for 0.75 or 75%, 05 for 0.05 or 5%, 001 for 0.001 or 0.1% etc (basically just taking the decimal probability and omitting the decimal point). Footnotes could be added for explanations where appropriate.
Maybe the statements (or numbers) could be colour coded for ease of spotting whether something is regarded as highly likely or highly unlikely, or somewhere in the middle. Although maybe all of this will disrupt the flow of reading too much?
Words of estimative probability from the intelligence world is a related concept.
The problem with these is having everyone on the same page of what the words mean. I recall Toby Ord not liking the IPCC’s use of them in The Precipice for this reason.
I agree that words are quite imprecise and usually having numbers is superior.