Standard Decisive Confidence
Oct. 27th, 2021 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itrytobepeople who pretend to care about numbers are always like, "you can't be more than 100% certain of something! more than 100% is not possible!" but in fact lots of things are over 100% all the time. take, as an example, the number of books i've read in 2021 so far, which is 154% of the number of books i intended to read.
"but," i hear you say, "that's thing A being more than 100% of thing B! but it can't be more than 100% of itself!" well, dear reader, if we follow that logic, is it really possible for anything to be less than 100% of itself either? (this could be an exciting ontological discussion but it's not late enough at night for that right now.)
perhaps it would be more relevant to consider claims of certainty expressed in percentages as proportions of some kind of Standard Decisive Confidence. if you're 90% certain, you're rather confident, but not as much as you would like. if you're 200% certain, then your degree of certainty exceeds the Standard Decisive Confidence level. nothing weird about it!
(so until someone points me to credible evidence of an empirically measurable absolute maximum degree of certainty possible, i consider this discussion closed.) just kidding, i love to talk about this kind of stuff lol please shoot
"but," i hear you say, "that's thing A being more than 100% of thing B! but it can't be more than 100% of itself!" well, dear reader, if we follow that logic, is it really possible for anything to be less than 100% of itself either? (this could be an exciting ontological discussion but it's not late enough at night for that right now.)
perhaps it would be more relevant to consider claims of certainty expressed in percentages as proportions of some kind of Standard Decisive Confidence. if you're 90% certain, you're rather confident, but not as much as you would like. if you're 200% certain, then your degree of certainty exceeds the Standard Decisive Confidence level. nothing weird about it!
(so until someone points me to credible evidence of an empirically measurable absolute maximum degree of certainty possible, i consider this discussion closed.) just kidding, i love to talk about this kind of stuff lol please shoot
