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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

Amongst people who think probabilistically, this isn't a weird statement. It's a very low precision guestimate. There is a qualitative difference between 50-50, 90-10, 99-1 etc, and it's only their best guess anyway.

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Just because you can generate numbers between 0 and 1 doesn't make them meaningful probabilities.

Are these based on data? No, they're rhetorical tools used to sound quantitative and scientific.

Nobody will be applying the calculus of probability to these meaningless numbers coming out of someone's ass.

And most importantly, is he himself willing to bet a significant fraction of his fortune based on these socalled probabilities? I don't think so. So they're not probabilities.

A conversation like this happens every minute between investors, people who work at hedge funds, trader types, bookies, people who work in cat insurance etc. They just think this way. They are "priors" in Bayes world. Based on intuition. Notice the lack of precision. Nobody says "50%" or "10%" to sound scientific. I'm 99.9% certain it's better than using ambiguous terms "likely", "probably", "certainly possible" and so on.

I like to use the the 0.1% cya too, but that makes you sound 99.9% less sure.

1 in a 1000 is probably the best way to do it. 99.9% and 0.1% sound like fake precision, even though they aren't.

The 50-50 probability is way overused. It is like ppl subconsciously think that two outcomes make the odds 1:1.

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