[aftoprokrustes]

I obviously cannot assess the validity of the requests you got, but as a former researcher turned product developer, I had several times to take the decision _not_ to display confidence intervals in products, and to keep them as an internal feature for quality evaluation.

Why, I hear you ask? Because, for the kind of system of models I use (detailed stochastic simulations of human behavior), there is no good definition of a confidence interval that can be computed in a reasonable amount of computing time. One can design confidence measures that can be computed without too much overhead, but they can be misleading if you do not have a very good understanding of what they represent and do not represent.

To simplify, the error bars I was able to compute were mostly a measure of precision, but I had no way to assess accuracy, which is what most people assume error bars mean. So showing the error bars would have actually given a false sense of quality, which I did not feel confident to give. So not displaying those measures was actually done as a service to the user.

Now, one might make the argument that if we had no way to assess accuracy, the type of models we used was just rubbish and not much more useful than a wild guess... Which is a much wider topic, and there are good arguments for and against this statement.