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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More or Less · The Census and what does 'rare' mean? · 14 Dec 2012 podcast

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%.

And that's true for all of the phrases.

There's quite a lot of variability between people in the number that they interpret the word to mean.

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, they've got a confidence terminology.

So 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

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