[ENOTTY]

This is a very useful article if you want to understand the technical language used by the UK and US intelligence communities, which is often parroted by the media reporting on topics using sources that leak intelligence from those communities. This language has been standardized within their respective communities so that all parties involved (from the President to the lowliest analyst) should be on the same page with respect to the intelligence.

According to the article there are two measures:

- a probabilistic measurement and associated language, which speaks to the assessed likelihood of an event occurring

- a confidence measurement and associated language, which speaks to the assessed quality of the source(s) of the intelligence

[7thaccount]

I read a book that touched on this called "super forecasters". Apparently there was a push to reduce ambiguity in briefings. I can't remember if it was Obama or a different president (may have been as far back as Carter), but they were told something by an intelligence advisor and they asked for what is basically a confidence interval. The advisor went back and found out what they were conveying as a sure thing was basically like 50:50 chance. At some point they then decided to come up with a system to make this clearer.

[ENOTTY]

Per the article:

> In 1964 Sherman Kent, a cia analyst, coined the phrase “words of estimative probability”.

So that must have been even before Carter

[neves]

can you post this language here? The article is paywalled

[boomboomsubban]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091213