Professor Neil Stewart
speaker
41 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2012
last heard Dec 2012
Professor Neil Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What's been done is, I guess it's a first step, it's quite crude.
People say questions like, if Tim looks into the urn and sees that there are 30 prize-winning balls and he says there's a good chance of winning, how many balls do you think are in the urn?
So if you said there's a good chance, maybe I'll think, well, Tim's an honest person.
There are probably 25 balls in the urn.
And so we'd interpret that to mean that I understand what you say when you say good chances, meaning 25% chance.
If we start at the bottom, we've got never, which typically people think means never.
0% chance.
We've got the rarely that we're interested in here.
That's coming in at an 8% chance.
But it's quite variable.
So some people who've said rarely actually said they thought 0%.
And other people will have said numbers as high as 20%.
So we've got never, rarely, seldom, improbable, uncommon, toss-up, which is coming in at 47%.
Then we've got predictable, common, frequently, probable, often, likely, usually and always is up there at 94%.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is one example where they've tried to legislate what words their researchers can use to describe certain events.
So, for example, if you say very high confidence as a scientist, you have to mean at least a 9 out of 10 chance.
Or if you say medium confidence, you mean a 5 out of 10 chance.
And they've got a scale that maps the verbal phrases that we use to describe how confident we are onto sort of a numerical scale of probabilities.
What's been done is, I guess it's a first step, it's quite crude.
People say questions like, if Tim looks into the urn and sees that there are 30 prize-winning balls and he says there's a good chance of winning, how many balls do you think are in the urn?
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