likely
If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
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Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#72This article, and some of the comments here, reminded me of another article (and GDC talk) by Civilization game designer Sid Meier, about his experience with players' perception of probability in games. Sid's talk grapples with the issue "If the game says you have 3-to-1 odds to win a battle, how often do players actually expect to win?" > When designing the combat system in Civilization: Revolution, Sid Meier found…
Maybe the key here is that strength ratio != odds, under most intuitive definitions of strength. If someone is twice as strong as you, they're arguably much more than twice as likely to defeat you. If someone has twice the number of units as you, they're also more than twice as likely to defeat you.
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but the actual opinions run quite lean and are unqualified except for the “usually,” which the reader understands is placed to head off anecdotal contrary examples. The last one ends with a blunt insult. It’s certainly not DFW’s style of writing.
You are certainly entitled to your interpretation, but I don't think the writer put in "usually" just to head off anecdotal counterexamples. The principle of charity leads me to assume the writer genuinely believes that simple bold assertions are occasionally fine. Though I do strongly agree with the original comment, so maybe that is the real reason why I am defending it.
That’s fair! I disagree with the reasons presented in the comment, but I agree that carefully qualified, elaborate writing, as well as florid descriptive writing, are all acceptable, and frequently desirable. I just thought the irony in the comment’s style was funny, and maintain that it is stylistically terse overall.
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#74It depends on the context. Hillary Clinton had a >70% of winning the US presidential election according to the most responsible analyses (see 538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ ). Most folks took 70% to mean that she would certainly win and were bitterly disappointed the morning after. On the other hand no sane person would (willingly) play Russian roulette with a 70% or even 5 of 6 cha…
>Hillary Clinton had a >70% of winning the US presidential election Probabilities without confidence intervals[1] are by-and-large meaningless (She has a 90% chance of of winning with a confidence interval of +11% -100%). No amount of d3.js on 538's blog will change this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
What? Confidence intervals are used to assign a confidence to a measure of a larger population.
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#75It depends on the context. Hillary Clinton had a >70% of winning the US presidential election according to the most responsible analyses (see 538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ ). Most folks took 70% to mean that she would certainly win and were bitterly disappointed the morning after. On the other hand no sane person would (willingly) play Russian roulette with a 70% or even 5 of 6 cha…
The analysis after the elections was interesting-- think pieces asking things like "How could the stats have been so wrong?!". A fair dice has a roughly 83% chance of landing on a number between 1 and 5, but if you roll a 6 you don't ask yourself the same question.
People are mixing up % of vote with likelihood of victory.
If she was polling at 70% that would be an almost 100% chance of winning because a 20% swing is unlikely. However a 70% chance of victory is much much closer.
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Hillary Clinton had a >70% of winning the US presidential election Probabilities without confidence intervals[1] are by-and-large meaningless (She has a 90% chance of of winning with a confidence interval of +11% -100%). No amount of d3.js on 538's blog will change this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
From a Bayesian perspective, or from a betting one, it doesn't make sense to put probabilities in a confidence interval. You might be uncertain about the world, but you can be certain about how much uncertainty you have, since it's a property of your own mind.
> From a Bayesian perspective, or from a betting one, it doesn't make sense to put probabilities in a confidence interval
"Bayesian perspective" covers a lot of territory, and your assertion depends on the situation and the modeling objective. If a probability is a model parameter (for instance, frequency of heads for a particular coin), then summarizing the posterior distribution on that parameter with a confidence interval can be a sensible thing to do.
Or do you mean as opposed to a credibility interval?
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Probabilities without confidence intervals are by-and-large meaningless. That's just not true. If I believe that my team has a 20% chance to win and you offer me a bet with anything better than 5-to-1 odds I should take the bet. If you offer me anything worse than 5-to-1, then I should not take the bet. There's no fuzz factor necessary; no confidence interval that I need to use to make the decision. Perhaps you're…
I think this is getting to the root of the problem — you're taking a perfectly valid frequentist view of probability, that is, viewing it as a series of discrete experiments. But the probabilities that were assigned to Clinton's victory were derived from Bayesian probability theory that estimates the likelihood that event occurs based on empirically determined prior probabilities that contribute to that event. Those…
It's a property of the thing being measured, not of the measuring system.
A Bayesian calculating that probability must get a single number too, without error margins. The only difference is that the Bayesian will have to weight his probabilities by how much of the interval is at the "win" and the "no win" scenarios.
It is different if you are measuring how many votes each candidate will have. For that both methods must get intervals and a confidence level.
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#78It depends on the context. Hillary Clinton had a >70% of winning the US presidential election according to the most responsible analyses (see 538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ ). Most folks took 70% to mean that she would certainly win and were bitterly disappointed the morning after. On the other hand no sane person would (willingly) play Russian roulette with a 70% or even 5 of 6 cha…
> no sane person would (willingly) play Russian roulette with a 70% or even 5 of 6 chance of "winning".
That’s because there’s no upside to Russian roulette. Put some money on it, and people would be more likely to take the wager. In its standard form (as I understand it), the only benefit to winning is the rush from having played.
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#79It depends on the context. Hillary Clinton had a >70% of winning the US presidential election according to the most responsible analyses (see 538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ ). Most folks took 70% to mean that she would certainly win and were bitterly disappointed the morning after. On the other hand no sane person would (willingly) play Russian roulette with a 70% or even 5 of 6 cha…
> Most folks took 70% to mean that she would certainly win and were bitterly disappointed the morning after.
Surely, given the outcome, more of those folks were pleasantly surprised at the outcome than "bitterly disappointed".
Re: If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
#80For what it is worth, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses the following definitions[0]: virtually certain: 99-100% extremely likely: 95-100% very likely: 90-100% likely: 66-100% about as likely as not: 33-66% more likely than not: >50-100% more unlikely than likely: 0- unlikely: 0-33% very unlikely: 0-10% extremely unlikely: 0-5% exceptionally unlikely: 0-1% [0]: https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/a…
Sounds like it is 'exceptionally unlikely' that the police will find alcohol in my blood after I drank 3 bottles of wine ;-) (Yes, I am mixing things up here)
on the other hand, if your blood alcohol concentration rose outside the "exceptionally unlikely" range it is "almost certain" that you'd be dead.