My reply is a mix of the considerations you anticipate. With apologies for brevity:
It’s not clear to me whether avoiding anchoring favours (e.g.) round numbers or not. If my listener, in virtue of being human, is going to anchor on whatever number I provide them, I might as well anchor them on a number I believe to be more accurate.
I expect there are better forms of words for my examples which can better avoid the downsides you note (e.g. maybe saying ‘roughly 12%’ instead of ’12%′ still helps, even if you give a later articulation).
I’m less fussed about precision re. resilience (e.g. ‘I’d typically expect drift of several percent from this with a few more hours to think about it’ doesn’t seem much worse than ‘the standard error of this forecast is 6% versus me with 5 hours more thinking time’ or similar). I’d still insist something at least pseudo-quantitative is important, as verbal riders may not put the listener in the right ballpark (e.g. does ‘roughly’ 10% pretty much rule out it being 30%?)
Similar to the ‘trip to the shops’ example in the OP, there’s plenty of cases where precision isn’t a good way to spend time and words (e.g. I could have counter-productively littered many of the sentences above with precise yet non-resilient forecasts). I’d guess there’s also cases where it is better to sacrifice precision to better communicate with your listener (e.g. despite the rider on resilience you offer, they will still think ’12%′ is claimed to be accurate to the nearest percent, but if you say ‘roughly 10%’ they will better approximate what you have in mind). I still think when the stakes are sufficiently high, it is worth taking pains on this.
My reply is a mix of the considerations you anticipate. With apologies for brevity:
It’s not clear to me whether avoiding anchoring favours (e.g.) round numbers or not. If my listener, in virtue of being human, is going to anchor on whatever number I provide them, I might as well anchor them on a number I believe to be more accurate.
I expect there are better forms of words for my examples which can better avoid the downsides you note (e.g. maybe saying ‘roughly 12%’ instead of ’12%′ still helps, even if you give a later articulation).
I’m less fussed about precision re. resilience (e.g. ‘I’d typically expect drift of several percent from this with a few more hours to think about it’ doesn’t seem much worse than ‘the standard error of this forecast is 6% versus me with 5 hours more thinking time’ or similar). I’d still insist something at least pseudo-quantitative is important, as verbal riders may not put the listener in the right ballpark (e.g. does ‘roughly’ 10% pretty much rule out it being 30%?)
Similar to the ‘trip to the shops’ example in the OP, there’s plenty of cases where precision isn’t a good way to spend time and words (e.g. I could have counter-productively littered many of the sentences above with precise yet non-resilient forecasts). I’d guess there’s also cases where it is better to sacrifice precision to better communicate with your listener (e.g. despite the rider on resilience you offer, they will still think ’12%′ is claimed to be accurate to the nearest percent, but if you say ‘roughly 10%’ they will better approximate what you have in mind). I still think when the stakes are sufficiently high, it is worth taking pains on this.
That all makes sense to me—thanks for the answer!
And interesting point regarding the way anchoring may also boost the value of precision—I hadn’t considered that previously.