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Luke_A_Somers comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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BTW, I'd also disallow 0 and 100, and give the option of giving log-odds instead of probability (and maybe encourage to do that for probabilities <1% and >99%). Someone's “epsilon” might be 10^-4 whereas someone else's might be 10^-30.
People will mess up the log-odds, though. Non-log odds seem safer.
Two fields instead of one, but it seems cleaner than any of the other alternatives.
The point is not having to type lots of zeros (or of nines) with extreme probabilities (so that people won't weasel out and use ‘epsilon’); having to type 1:999999999999999 is no improvement over having to type 0.000000000000001.
Is such precision meaningful? At least for me personally, 0.1% is about as low as I can meaningfully go - I can't really discriminate between me having an estimate of 0.1%, 0.001%, or 0.0000000000001%.
I expect this is incorrect.
Specifically, I would guess that you can distinguish the strength of your belief that a lottery ticket you might purchase will win the jackpot from one in a thousand (a.k.a. 0.1%). Am I mistaken?
That's a very special case -- in the case of the lottery, it is actually possible-in-principle to enumerate BIG_NUMBER equally likely mutually-exclusive outcomes. Same with getting the works of shakespeare out of your random number generator. The things under discussion don't have that quality.
You're right, good point.
I agree in principle, but on the other hand the questions on the survey are nowhere as easy as "what's the probability of winning such-and-such lottery".
Just type 1:1e15 (or 1e-15 if you don't want odd ratios).