[HN Gopher] Possibly a Serious Possibility
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Possibly a Serious Possibility
Author : samclemens
Score : 127 points
Date : 2025-05-05 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kucharski.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kucharski.substack.com)
| mempko wrote:
| It's strange to map language to probability ranges. The guidance
| should be to just say the probability range. No ambiguity. Clear.
| Actionable and also measurable.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| It's still a subjective estimate, but Samosvety (predictor
| group) does seem to work that way, and HPMOR suggested
| something similar. Basically assign probabiltiies to less
| complex unknowns using numbers pulled out of your butt if
| that's all you can do. Then you can compute conditional
| probabilities of various more complicated events using those
| priors. At least then, a consistent set of numbers has carried
| through the calculation, even if those numbers were wrong at
| the outset. It's suppose to help your mental clarity. I guess
| you can also perturb the initial numbers to guess something
| like a hyperdistribution at the other end.
|
| I haven't tried this myself and haven't run across a situation
| to apply it to lately, but I thought it was interesting.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > a consistent set of numbers has carried through the
| calculation, even if those numbers were wrong at the outset
|
| I kind of see how this _might_ be useful, but what I 've
| actually seen is an illusion of certainty from looking at
| numbers and thinking that means you're being quantitative
| instead of, you know, pulling things out of your butt.
| Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Yes, the potential illusion is most dangerous if you show
| someone else the numbers and they take them seriously. If
| they're only for your own calculations then you can
| remember what they are made of.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| In practice people seem to be very bad at remembering
| that. Pretty universally people act as though doing math
| on made up numbers makes them less erroneous rather than
| more.
| widforss wrote:
| That's the whole point of Fermi estimates. Find a
| plausible number given uncertain inputs.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yeah, mistaking precision for accuracy is a common
| fallacy.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Yeah, mistaking precision for accuracy is a common
| fallacy.
|
| I remember an appealing description of the difference
| being that a precise archer might sink all their arrows
| at the same spot on the edge of the target, whereas an
| accurate archer might sink all their arrows near the
| bull's eye without always hitting the same spot.
| Muromec wrote:
| That's the other way around -- there was no probability range
| to begin with.
| csours wrote:
| Or use a histogram.
| layer8 wrote:
| How would you possibly measure the "Probability of an Invasion
| of Yugoslavia in 1951", in March 1951?
| konstantinua00 wrote:
| 9/12
|
| 3 months have passed, 9 to go :)
| hlieberman wrote:
| It's not just the UK who has standardized on these language; the
| U.S. intelligence community also has a list of required
| terminology to use for different confidence levels and different
| likelihoods -- and distinguishing between them. It's all laid out
| in ICD-203, publicly available at
| https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICD/ICD-203.pdf
|
| I've found it very helpful in the same vein as RFC 2119
| terminology (MUST, SHOULD, MAY, etc.); when you need your
| meanings to be understood by a counterparty and can agree on a
| common language to use.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This problem crops up everywhere, especially when it's a
| consequential claim. Eg when the US Department of Energy says
| with 'low confidence' that the Sars-COV2 outbreak and pandemic
| was 'most likely' was the result of a laboratory leak, what
| number does that translate to on the certainty scale?
|
| Also, what likelihood can we assign to claims that the virus was
| deliberately modified at the furin cleavage site as part of a
| gain-of-function research program aimed at assessing the risks of
| species-jumping behavior in bat coronaviruses? This is a separate
| question from the lab escape issue, which dould have involved
| either a collected wild-type virus or one that had been
| experimentally modified.
|
| Perhaps experts in the field 'misinterpreted the evidence' back
| in the early months of the pandemic, much as happened with the
| CIA and its 'intelligence on Iraq'?
|
| https://interestingengineering.com/health/us-doe-says-covid-...
| nightpool wrote:
| I highly recommend that you read through
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
| and watch the underlying debate (starting here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1vaooTKHCM), it does a really
| good job of laying out the arguments for and against lab leak
| in a very thorough and evidence-based way like you're asking
| for here.
| dejobaan wrote:
| That was a good read (and short, with a cool graph--I want to
| know who tagged "Almost No Chance" as 95% likely; a would-be
| Pratchett fan, perhaps). In biz, that's part of why I like to
| separate out goals ("we'll focus on growing traffic") and
| concrete objectives ("25% audience growth between now and June
| 1st").
| patrickmay wrote:
| But is it EXACTLY a million to one chance?
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I hate "one in a million" because its meaning depends on how
| many times you're rolling the die!
|
| I'll never forgot old World of Warcraft discussions about
| crit probability. If a particular sequence is "one in a
| million" and there are 10 million players and each player
| encounters hundreds or thousands of sequences per day then
| "one in a million" is pretty effing common!
| gpcz wrote:
| In functional safety, probabilities are usually clamped to
| an hour of use.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I hate "one in a million" because its meaning depends on
| how many times you're rolling the die!
|
| I'd argue that it doesn't depend on that at all; its
| meaning is the same whether you're performing the trial
| once, a million times, ten million times, or whatever. It's
| just whether its implication is "the possibility may be
| disregarded" or "this should be expected to happen a few
| times" that depends on how many times you're performing the
| trial.
| ModernMech wrote:
| My feeling is it's a measure of the number of people who read
| the question wrong.
| chaps wrote:
| The City of Chicago's lawyers went the opposite direction in
| response to @tpacek's affidavit that the release of table/column
| names would have "marginal value" to an attacker. The city
| latched onto that to get a trial that eventually went to the IL
| Supreme Court and lost. [I]n my affidavit, I
| wrote that SQL schemas would provide "only marginal value" to an
| attacker. Big mistake. Chicago jumped on those words and said
| "see, you yourself agree that a schema is of some value to an
| attacker." Of course, I don't really believe that; "only marginal
| value" is just self-important message-board hedging. I also
| claimed on the stand that "only an incompetently built
| application" could be attacked with nothing but it's schema. Even
| I don't know what I meant by that.
|
| His post: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2025/02/09/fixing-illinois-
| foia/ My post: https://mchap.io/losing-a-5yr-long-illinois-foia-
| lawsuit-for...
| snitty wrote:
| >The City of Chicago's lawyers went the opposite direction
|
| Not really.
|
| >I wrote that SQL schemas would provide "only marginal value"
| to an attacker. Big mistake. Chicago jumped on those words and
| said "see, you yourself agree that a schema is of some value to
| an attacker."
|
| The City of Chicago's argument was that something of ANY value,
| no matter how insignificant, would help an attacker exploit
| their system, and was therefore possible to keep secret under
| the FOIA law.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Such a literal interpretation isn't reasonable. There are all
| sorts of patterns that can be indirectly leaked through
| supposedly unrelated data. Yet FOIA exists and is obviously
| intended to be useful.
|
| So obviously there must be some threshold for the value to an
| attacker. He attempted to communicate that schemas are
| clearly below such a threshold and they used his wording to
| attempt to argue the opposite.
| mcphage wrote:
| > The City of Chicago's argument was that something of ANY
| value, no matter how insignificant, would help an attacker
| exploit their system, and was therefore possible to keep
| secret under the FOIA law.
|
| I'm glad that argument lost, since it totally subverts the
| purpose and intention of the FOIA. Any piece of information
| could be of value to _some_ attacker, but that doesn't
| outweigh the need for transparency.
| jMyles wrote:
| > Since then, some governments have tried to clean up the
| language of probability. After the Iraq War--which was influenced
| by misinterpreted intelligence
|
| While I laud the gracious application of Hanlon's Razor here, I
| also think that, for at least some actors, the imprecision was
| the feature they needed, rather than the bug they mistakenly
| implemented.
| christiangenco wrote:
| I've had the same sort of difficulty with phrases like "most" or
| "almost all" or "hardly any"--I crave for these to map to
| unambiguous numbers like the probability yardstick referenced in
| this article.
|
| I spun up a quick survey[1] that I sent out to friends and family
| to try to get some numbers on these sorts of phrases. Results so
| far are inconclusive.
|
| 1. https://www.vaguequantifiers.com/
| jbaber wrote:
| "Almost all" in math can mean "except at every integer or
| fraction" :)
| layer8 wrote:
| The semantics are almost always reasonable:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_all
| tejtm wrote:
| I would expect almost NO numbers are rational (integer or
| fraction) with an infinite number of Reals between each.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I would expect almost NO numbers are rational (integer or
| fraction) with an infinite number of Reals between each.
|
| You're right (technically correct, which is the best etc.)!
| That is why "almost all" can mean everything _except_
| rational numbers.
| noqc wrote:
| in between any two real numbers, there is a rational
| number, and vice versa.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > "Almost all" in math can mean "except at every integer or
| fraction" :)
|
| I am a mathematician, but, even so, I think that this is one
| of those instances where we have to admit that we have
| mangled everyday terminology when appropriating it, and so
| non-measure theoretic users should just ignore our
| definition. (Similarly with "group," where, at the risk of
| sounding tongue-in-cheek because it's so obvious, if I were
| trying to analyze how people usually understand its everyday
| meaning I wouldn't include the requirement that every element
| have an inverse.)
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Sure but that's because 100% of real numbers, by any standard
| measure, aren't integers or fractions. It bothers me if it's
| used to mean 95% of something though.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| "Almost all" is an interesting one, because it has family of
| mathematical definitions in addition to any informal
| definitions. If X is a set, "almost all elements of X" means
| "all elements of X except those in a negligible subset of X",
| where "negligible" depends on context but is well-defined.
|
| If there's a finite subset of an infinite set, almost all
| members of the infinite set are not in the finite set. E.g.
| Almost all integers are not 5: the set of integers equal to
| five is finite and the set of integers not equal to five is
| countably infinite.
|
| Likewise for two infinite sets of different size: Almost all
| real numbers are not integers.
|
| Etc.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The more precisely they are defined, the less frequently will
| you see them used correctly.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have a habit of saying "almost definitely" which I have tried
| to break but I still fall back to it occasionally. And I know
| several people who will say something is "definitely possible" or
| "certainly a possibility" or something along those lines. It's
| all insecure language we use to avoid making a statement that
| might turn out to be wrong.
| rekenaut wrote:
| I often say "definitely possible" when I am not sure what the
| chance of something happening is but I ought to acknowledge
| that it is possible. It is definitely possible that I should
| choose better language to communicate this.
| smitty1e wrote:
| When they won't quit asking, I'm "willing to commit to a
| definite maybe".
| hunter2_ wrote:
| "Rare" versus "common" is an interesting one. They sound like
| antonyms, but I don't think the typical probabilities are really
| symmetrical. Maybe something like 0%-10% for rare (although some
| sources say 5%) and something like 40%-100% for common.
| konstantinua00 wrote:
| "common" has such a large spread because meaning behind it is
| sort of "at least one in each sample", where that sample can be
| anything (graspable)
|
| if you're a teacher and one student per class does the same
| thing - it's common. Even though it's only 1/25 or 1/30 of all
| students
| Macha wrote:
| Maybe it's my amount of video games played in childhood that
| influenced that, but common and rare are just two points on a
| spectrum (with at least "uncommon" in between)
| senderista wrote:
| I was so frustrated when I tried to get doctors to quantify their
| assessment of risk for a surgery my sister was about to undergo.
| They simply wouldn't give me a number, not even "better or worse
| than even odds". Finally an anesthesiologist privately told me
| she thought my sister had maybe a one-third chance of dying on
| the table and that was enough for me. I'm not sure how much fear
| of liability had to do with this reluctance, or if it was just a
| general aversion to discussing risk in quantitative terms (which
| isn't that hard, gamblers do it all the time!).
| chychiu wrote:
| Doctor here
|
| 1. It's generally difficult to quantify such risks in any
| meaningful manner
|
| 2. Provision of any number adds liability, and puts you in a
| damned-if-does, damned-if-it-doesn't-work-out situation
|
| 3. The operating surgeon is not the best to quantify these
| risks - the surgeon owns the operation, and the
| anaesthesiologist owns the patient / theatre
|
| 4. Gamblers quantify risk because they make money from accurate
| assessment of risk. Doctors are in no way incentivised to do so
|
| 5. The returned chance of 1/3 probably had an error margin of
| +/-33% itself
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > It's generally difficult to quantify such risks in any
| meaningful manner
|
| According to the literature 33 out of 100 patients who
| underwent this operation in the US within the past 10 years
| died. 90% of those had complicating factors. You [ do / do
| not ] have such a factor.
|
| Who knows if any given layman will appreciate the particular
| quantification you provide but I'm fairly certain that data
| exists for the vast majority of serious procedures at this
| point.
|
| I've actually had this exact issue with the veterinarian.
| I've worked in biomed. I pulled the literature for the
| condition. I had lots of different numbers but I knew that I
| didn't have the full picture. I'm trying to quantify the
| possible outcomes between different options being presented
| to me. When I asked the specialist, who handles multiple such
| cases every day, I got back (approximately) "oh I couldn't
| say" and "it varies". The latter is obviously true but the
| entire attitude is just uncooperative bullshit.
|
| > puts you in a damned-if-does, damned-if-it-doesn't-work-out
| situation
|
| Not really. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a litigious
| person could use just about anything to go after you and so I
| appreciate that it might be sensible to simply refuse to
| answer. But from an academic standpoint the future outcome of
| a single sample does not change the rigor of your risk
| assessment.
|
| > Doctors are in no way incentivised to do so
|
| Don't they use quantifications of risk to determine treatment
| plans to at least some extent? What's the alternative?
| Blindly following a flowchart? (Honest question.)
|
| > The returned chance of 1/3 probably had an error margin of
| +/-33% itself
|
| What do you mean by this? Surely there's some error margin on
| the assessment itself but I don't see how any of us
| commenting could have any idea what it might have been.
| a3w wrote:
| How was this not on lesswrong.com, they are all about ]0..1[
| Macha wrote:
| Who are the people that have a small bump of believing "better
| than even" is 10-20%? Why?
| didgetmaster wrote:
| "The odds are more like a million to one!"
|
| "So...you're telling me there is a chance!"
| bmurray7jhu wrote:
| Text of NIE 29-51 "Probability of an Invasion of Yugoslavia in
| 1951"
|
| Partial HTML:
| https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951v04p2/...
|
| Full text PDF scan: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-
| RDP79R01012A0007000...
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