Your “90% confidence interval” of… what, exactly? This looks like a confidence interval over the value of your own subjective probability estimate? And “90% as the mean” of… a bunch of different guesses you’ve taken at your “true” subjective probability? I can’t imagine why anyone would do that but I can’t think what else this could coherently mean…?
If I can be blunt, I suspect you might be repeating probabilistic terms without really tracking their technical meaning, as though you’re just inserting nontechnical hedges. Maybe it’s worth taking the time to reread the map/territory stuff and then run through some calibration practice problems while thinking closely about what you’re doing. Or maybe just use nontechnical hedges more, they work perfectly well for expressing things like this.
Thanks for the feedback—it has indeed been a long time since I did high school statistics!
I specified that the numbers I gave were “approximations to prove my point” is because I know that I do not have a technical statistical model in my head, and I didn’t want to pretend that was the case. Given this is a non-technical, shortform post, I thought it was clear what I meant—apologies if that wasn’t so.
...What on earth does “90% probability, with medium confidence” mean? Do you think it’s 90% likely or not?
It means something like “my 90% confidence interval is 80% − 95%, with 90% as the mean”.
Your “90% confidence interval” of… what, exactly? This looks like a confidence interval over the value of your own subjective probability estimate? And “90% as the mean” of… a bunch of different guesses you’ve taken at your “true” subjective probability? I can’t imagine why anyone would do that but I can’t think what else this could coherently mean…?
If I can be blunt, I suspect you might be repeating probabilistic terms without really tracking their technical meaning, as though you’re just inserting nontechnical hedges. Maybe it’s worth taking the time to reread the map/territory stuff and then run through some calibration practice problems while thinking closely about what you’re doing. Or maybe just use nontechnical hedges more, they work perfectly well for expressing things like this.
Thanks for the feedback—it has indeed been a long time since I did high school statistics!
I specified that the numbers I gave were “approximations to prove my point” is because I know that I do not have a technical statistical model in my head, and I didn’t want to pretend that was the case. Given this is a non-technical, shortform post, I thought it was clear what I meant—apologies if that wasn’t so.