The amount of pedantry and over the top literalism in your comment gave me an aneurism.

But it didn't really give you an aneurysm, did it???.

It was only likely to give him an aneurysm.

What numerical value? He either did it or didn't. Likely is an expression on the subjective probability based on the information they have.

What subjective probability is at play? None of us were there, or even in court. Maybe something very traumatic to Mr. McAfee happened that day. Would that inform some of his later recklessness?

What is the value of the poster's feelings about this, when we can rely on actual information instead? Appending "likely" to the statement is just a way to dress up a baseless opinion in the garb of objectivity.

I believe that’s how most people in society invoke a numerically void word like the word “likely”.

Call my cynical, but time and experience has taught me that people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor.

It’s as if they want to express an opinion without doing the leg work or providing any citations.

Had he invested the time to calculate an estimate of likelihood, I’m willing to bet an estimate or confidence interval would have been parenthetically inserted into his remarks.

That’s what my experience tells me. YMMV

"people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor."

To be fair, how in the world am I supposed to calculate such things and provide a satisfactory number?

The vast majority of my conversations and discourse don't require or benefit from giving a range or specific value to such words. Would the preceding sentence be better if I said 90%, 95%, 99.5% instead of 'vast majority'? And to be honest, most people - especially myself - aren't at all accurate with probability estimates, let alone calculations.

> To be fair, how in the world am I supposed to calculate such things and provide a satisfactory number?

I take it you're not a Bayesian. ;)

Would you have preferred the poster express a specific probability that they hold their belief at?

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