roystgnr comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

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Comment author: roystgnr 08 October 2012 03:11:17PM 3 points [-]

Precisely: for some reason you're not allowed to say "I assign a 70% probability to X being true" without people looking at you funny, and even "I think X is more likely than not-X, but you shouldn't be as confident of this as you are of most things I tell you" is kind of awkward, but "I believe so" is a pretty standard idiom for expressing high-probability-which-is-still-non-negligibly-different-from-1.

If you're stuck trying to communicate in an innumerate language then you use whatever phrasing you have available.

Comment author: CronoDAS 08 October 2012 10:22:49PM 3 points [-]

"I suspect X" seems to be a compact phrasing that suggests considerable uncertainty, as is "I guess X"...

Comment author: Sniffnoy 09 October 2012 12:34:35AM 0 points [-]

Also, "I would expect X".