>If social norms indeed dictate that significant figures transmit confidence, might it be deceptive to report 31.5 instead of 30 in conversation about the dinosaur market?
Not if it’s your bid in a market, yes if someone asks you for your probability estimate. Your best point estimate is obviously your best point estimate, and suffers from rounding.
> Betty’s landing capsule collides with a giant teapot in upper orbit and lands several hundred miles away from target. She still has to report her beliefs about the mysterious coin.
Why? If she has to offer someone a bet as to which side the coin lands on, she should probably offer even odds, but I can’t see any situation where she has to report her probability but isn’t able to report that this is based on nothing more than her prior.
The thought experiment was an attempt to formalize the constraints of casual conversation, where it would feel to me pedantic to report additional details about a probability beyond a single number.
>If social norms indeed dictate that significant figures transmit confidence, might it be deceptive to report 31.5 instead of 30 in conversation about the dinosaur market?
Not if it’s your bid in a market, yes if someone asks you for your probability estimate. Your best point estimate is obviously your best point estimate, and suffers from rounding.
> Betty’s landing capsule collides with a giant teapot in upper orbit and lands several hundred miles away from target. She still has to report her beliefs about the mysterious coin.
Why? If she has to offer someone a bet as to which side the coin lands on, she should probably offer even odds, but I can’t see any situation where she has to report her probability but isn’t able to report that this is based on nothing more than her prior.
The thought experiment was an attempt to formalize the constraints of casual conversation, where it would feel to me pedantic to report additional details about a probability beyond a single number.