Morning coffee . . . and other stories

Judging probability

P values and confidence intervals are often used in science and medicine to quantify chance and uncertainty. An essay in Nature, however, claims that probability isn’t an objective property of a system but a construct rooted in subjective judgments and doubtful assumptions (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04096-5). To illustrate the point, there’s a challenging quiz that assesses not only what you know but also how confident you are about it. Are you cautious, hedging knowledge gaps with an admission of low certainty? Or at the other end of the spectrum—overconfident and unaware of the extent of your …