It seems that I've failed to make my point.

Either you have or I have. As I believe I understand entirely what your position here is, I can't help but wonder.

It is, as far as I can tell, safe to assume that everyone who reads LW understands enough about probabilities that saying 'zero' would communicate exactly the same concept regarding the probability at hand as saying 'epsilon', if we had a norm of allowing the former.

Here's the thing: nothing I've been saying was tailored at any point to be specific to Less Wrong in particular.

It's also not a safe assumption, by the way, for the simple fact there is at least one person who recommends this community to every budding (or potential) rationalist he encounters -- me. At least one of those persons (my ex-primary of 10 years) has an exceedingly poor capability of grasping mathematics and probabilities. This was one of the reasons she and I didn't make it past that 10 year mark.

The reason for doing the latter is about signaling, in much the same way that saying 'most women' instead of just 'women' is about signaling.

See, I suspect there might be a political element to this as well. I for one would strongly prefer that the second-order simulacrum be the standard assumption rather than requiring continued increased cognitive burden in discourse. It is true that we think in language; and therefore the language we use shapes our thoughts -- but language is a memeplex of symbolic representations of semantical content/value. If we adjust the symbol, we adjust the thought. But this is now becoming an altogether different topic of conversation.

the point of the signal is to encourage accurate thought in the long run, rather than letting a small amount of convenience in the near term to outweigh that.

Reductively, the long term is nothing more than a collection of near terms. What remains a constant near term burden over the long term becomes a long-term burden.

I remain of the position that constantly adding caveats and provisos to language regardless of where the focus of discourse at a given moment happens to be is a fundamental error in communication. Since we can't seem to agree on this topic, I have to wonder what postulates we aren't sharing in common.