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gjm comments on How did my baby die and what is the probability that my next one will? - Less Wrong
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Comments (23)
From my experience sitting on the other side of those conversations, I'm never going to give a number. First, producing the number is very resource intensive, likely more difficult that figuring out the correct things to do for the client.
Similarly, I'm not confident that I know (or remember) all the relevant facts about your situation that would effect my professional opinion. In particular, I've always found there were facts I was told and forgot or could have discovered but didn't. Even though I can perform quality work, failure to keep all those facts in mind during this estimate is not providing an opinion to a reasonable degree of professional certainty.
Third, my clients are human, and like all humans, are bad at probability. If I tell a client they have a 60% chance of winning and we lose, the client will be mad at me. That by itself is reason to give qualitative estimates, not quantitative ones.
Yup, that sounds very plausible. Would your unwillingness to give a number be changed if your client said -- as I think the OP here would -- something like this? "I understand that any probability you give me may be wrong in ways it's prohibitively hard to prevent, and I promise that I am not looking for perfection or anything like it. I understand that providing a probability may mean extra work, and I am happy to pay for that extra work. And I assure you that my own understanding of probability is extremely good and I will not do silly things like assuming that if you say something's unlikely and it happens then you're incompetent."
No, my answer would not change.
First, I don't believe the assertion. Second, the kind of work to generate this kind of answer is different from providing service for the client. I enjoy advocating for clients, not meta-level analysis of advocacy. Think medical care vs. MetaMed.
Fair enough. (In so far as you're typical, it sounds like the OP is unlikely to get any further benefit from talking to more medical professionals.)
This is a huge meta-level problem with trying to be rational as a human being, surrounded by other human beings who are not rational.
Organisations with access to quantitative information have every incentive to hide it from you because the average human is a f**king idiot who will make a total pig's breakfast of the decision theory and probability theory, and then try to use the legal system to punish the giver-of-information.