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I always often feel this way about folks who give probability based estimates of their certainty, instead of just describing their level of certainty with human language. Some caveats for things like 99%, which can be said in a way that makes it clear that it is actually just being used as and expression.

A funny way to describe 95% certainty, among a certain type of nerd at least, is a “critical failure.” IMO it is a nice way of expressing the fact that you’d be very surprised to be wrong, but then, D&D has a whole mechanic about 1-in-20 events happening occasionally. All without any numbers.

95% certainty is also, for a normal distribution, two standard deviations. Two sigma events happen very regularly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_r...

Yeah, I'd say they happen about 5 percent of the time.

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