Probabilistic Words

People use words to describe probabilities all the time.
Yet this leads to a huge amount of confusion, especially in financial press.
In this great article, Mauboussin (two of them) lay out learnings from a survey they did on this topic.
Take this chart – the term “real possibility” was taken to mean anything from 20%-80% by 1,700 people surveyed – a huge range.
Lots of interesting ideas inside on how to “combat” this bias.