It seems to me that providing a confidence level is mainly beneficial in allowing you and me to see how well calibrated your predictions are.
Providing a confidence level for counterfactual statements about history gives me virtually no information unless I already have a well-formed prior about your skill at historical counterfactual analysis, which, for the same reasons, I can’t really have.
I guess it could provide a very small amount of information if I think historical knowledge and historical counterfactual analysis are correlated, but I don’t have much reason to think that, especially for giant claims like whether Rome would have been Rome but for some factor.
So providing confidence levels seems to add little substantive here while making me feel like it does add something.
It seems to me that providing a confidence level is mainly beneficial in allowing you and me to see how well calibrated your predictions are.
It’s also just a way to communicate epistemic status, right?
Providing a confidence level for counterfactual statements about history gives me virtually no information unless I already have a well-formed prior about your skill at historical counterfactual analysis, which, for the same reasons, I can’t really have.
Not 100% sure i follow you, but I guess the idea was to communicate an estimate of how strong the causal influence is. Like, maybe Rome’s location caused it to grow economically early on, but had little impact on its ability to expand militarily after that (it would have expanded anyway). If I thought so, my confidence in the first of these claims would have stayed the same, but my confidence in the second would have been much lower:
It first outgrew the other Latin cities mainly due to its location as a nexus and its proximity to the wealthy Etruscans (75% confidence). If this is not the case, Rome does not get hegemony over Latium (70% confidence).
That said, I guess you’re right that it’s not that informative. The two claims are likely to be correlated. I’ll consider not giving confidences for such counterfactuals next time.
It seems to me that providing a confidence level is mainly beneficial in allowing you and me to see how well calibrated your predictions are.
Providing a confidence level for counterfactual statements about history gives me virtually no information unless I already have a well-formed prior about your skill at historical counterfactual analysis, which, for the same reasons, I can’t really have.
I guess it could provide a very small amount of information if I think historical knowledge and historical counterfactual analysis are correlated, but I don’t have much reason to think that, especially for giant claims like whether Rome would have been Rome but for some factor.
So providing confidence levels seems to add little substantive here while making me feel like it does add something.
It’s also just a way to communicate epistemic status, right?
Not 100% sure i follow you, but I guess the idea was to communicate an estimate of how strong the causal influence is. Like, maybe Rome’s location caused it to grow economically early on, but had little impact on its ability to expand militarily after that (it would have expanded anyway). If I thought so, my confidence in the first of these claims would have stayed the same, but my confidence in the second would have been much lower:
That said, I guess you’re right that it’s not that informative. The two claims are likely to be correlated. I’ll consider not giving confidences for such counterfactuals next time.