One workaround would be to assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you have read n academic papers on the subject. For example, only assign 90% confidence if you’ve read ten academic papers.
If you have read 10 papers on a political question, all the papers are concurring, and they represent the entire body of literature on that question, then 90% can be warranted. I strongly suspect that if you do a fair review of any question there will be a tremendous amount of disagreement, however, and a well-calibrated observer would rarely approach 90% without strong pre-existing ideological biases subverting their estimation processes.
I have read quite a few macroeconomics papers, and there are very few non-trival things that I would assign a 90% probability to, and almost by definition those aren’t the sort of things people talk about in “political discussions.” The more you read the more humble you become with respect to our level of knowledge in the social sciences, especially if you are literate in the hard sciences. If you expect your knowledge to cash out in terms of predictions about the world, we don’t know much. This is why if you ask an economics professor almost any question of substance, they will provide you with a lengthy docket of caveats.
Do you think that the standards given in the OP are too demanding? Not demanding enough?
If you have read 10 papers on a political question, all the papers are concurring, and they represent the entire body of literature on that question, then 90% can be warranted. I strongly suspect that if you do a fair review of any question there will be a tremendous amount of disagreement, however, and a well-calibrated observer would rarely approach 90% without strong pre-existing ideological biases subverting their estimation processes.
I have read quite a few macroeconomics papers, and there are very few non-trival things that I would assign a 90% probability to, and almost by definition those aren’t the sort of things people talk about in “political discussions.” The more you read the more humble you become with respect to our level of knowledge in the social sciences, especially if you are literate in the hard sciences. If you expect your knowledge to cash out in terms of predictions about the world, we don’t know much. This is why if you ask an economics professor almost any question of substance, they will provide you with a lengthy docket of caveats.
I agree with all of this.