I generally don’t care much about people’s confidence levels. I don’t Aumann agree that hard. But I do care how much effort someone has put in, how settled an idea is, whether is has been helpful or predictive. “Epistemic status: personal experience” is directly useful to me. I’ll judge probability on merits however confident someone is (maybe not if I know their calibration curves, but I don’t), but if I know what effort they did and didn’t put in, I’ll happily directly update on that. I don’t think it’s factually true that epistemic status ‘almost never’ conveys something other than a confidence level.
Epistemic status: did a few minutes informal searching to sanity check my claims, which were otherwise off the cuff.
I generally don’t care much about people’s confidence levels. I don’t Aumann agree that hard. But I do care how much effort someone has put in, how settled an idea is, whether is has been helpful or predictive. “Epistemic status: personal experience” is directly useful to me. I’ll judge probability on merits however confident someone is (maybe not if I know their calibration curves, but I don’t), but if I know what effort they did and didn’t put in, I’ll happily directly update on that. I don’t think it’s factually true that epistemic status ‘almost never’ conveys something other than a confidence level.
Epistemic status: did a few minutes informal searching to sanity check my claims, which were otherwise off the cuff.
Yeah but I don’t think OP meant that by using “confidence level” you have to give a percentage. You can just swap out the phrase. Your two examples:
Confidence level: personal experience
Confidence level: did a few minutes informal searching to sanity check my claims, which were otherwise off the cuff.
I think these still work perfectly well, and now they are understandable to a much larger set of people.
The first does not work at all. “Personal experience” is not a level of confidence, and does not imply any particular level of confidence.