The Importance of Understanding Gray Area
I have a frequent debate with a person at work, who shall remain nameless, about whether or not an expression of a percentage chance of an outcome has any validity. That is, his opinion is that it has no value for someone to opine that they believe an event has a certain percentage chance of occurring; in his mind, this is a non-statement, and the only valid expression of this form is a binary opinion: yes or no. In contrast, I think it's perfectly valid to say you think an event has a percentage chance of happening; that is, I think that statement has meaning. (You may think his opinion is absurd, as I do, or that my opinion is absurd; I'm not going to debate the merits of either per se. Rather, I'm going to write about why I think the ability to understand my perspective is important, in the broader sense.) The main reason he holds this opinion, I believe, is that you cannot "guess check" an opinion on an outcome which is expressed as a percentage chance. That i...