I’m ~.9 confident that it’s more understandable to state confidence levels.
That said, I do like the idea of grammatical evidential tags to conveniently express types of evidence—“Someone I trust told me this”, “I observed this directly”, “this seems to follow from other things I know”, etc. English has a few of these (e.g., “There must be an X” can clearly mean, if said a certain way, that I don’t know there is an X from direct observation, but I infer it from other available data) but not very many and they’re not very robust.
Actually, I think that while this might be true now, it would actually be helpful for us to start thinking about probabilities as integers on a log scale like I described. If we all switched to this system, I think we would be better off. Also, as it is now, we do not state confidence levels much, and this might encourage us to do so.
I agree that a community that conventionally used a log scale like you describe to communicate confidence levels (“probabilities”) would have advantages. It is not clear to me how, or if, this community can make a transition to that convention.
Perhaps a place to start would be by modeling the behavior you suggest, and adopting the habit yourself? (e.g., you say you “think” that starting to think about probabilities as integers on a log scale would leave us better off… what is that expressed in your suggested notation?)
I’m ~.9 confident that it’s more understandable to state confidence levels.
That said, I do like the idea of grammatical evidential tags to conveniently express types of evidence—“Someone I trust told me this”, “I observed this directly”, “this seems to follow from other things I know”, etc. English has a few of these (e.g., “There must be an X” can clearly mean, if said a certain way, that I don’t know there is an X from direct observation, but I infer it from other available data) but not very many and they’re not very robust.
Actually, I think that while this might be true now, it would actually be helpful for us to start thinking about probabilities as integers on a log scale like I described. If we all switched to this system, I think we would be better off. Also, as it is now, we do not state confidence levels much, and this might encourage us to do so.
I agree that a community that conventionally used a log scale like you describe to communicate confidence levels (“probabilities”) would have advantages. It is not clear to me how, or if, this community can make a transition to that convention.
Perhaps a place to start would be by modeling the behavior you suggest, and adopting the habit yourself? (e.g., you say you “think” that starting to think about probabilities as integers on a log scale would leave us better off… what is that expressed in your suggested notation?)