Interdisciplinary review · 2019

Communicating uncertainty about facts, numbers and science

van der Bles AM, van der Linden S, Freeman ALJ, Mitchell J, Galvao AB, Zaval L, Spiegelhalter DJ

What it found

Offers a framework for saying how sure we are about facts, numbers and science. The limited evidence suggests that admitting uncertainty does not necessarily backfire on trust, though the effect varies between people and formats.

Where the evidence stops

A review of a thin literature; it calls for more experiments.

How it shapes Pursue

Pursue

Pursue says 'I'm not sure' when it isn't. Honesty about uncertainty is not a trust risk to hide.

A design input, not evidence that Pursue works.

Cited in

  1. 01How should an AI say it isn't sure?Plainly, and without inventing a confidence number. Modern neural networks are often over-confident (Guo et al., 2017), and a system allowed to decline uncertain cases makes far fewer errors on the ones it answers (Geifman and El-Yaniv, 2017); a 2019 review led from the University of Cambridge found that admitting uncertainty does not necessarily cost trust.Trust and uncertainty

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