Month: April 2023

What do you mean when you say something is “probably” going to happen? Does that mean 50%? Greater? Less? In many fields, especially in intelligence, people use words to describe the likelihood of something happening.

Sherman Kent, one of the CIA’s premier intelligence professional, wrote about this subject. Since then, others have studied it and put together graphics to describe the words and their estimative probability.

Charles Weiss wrote about this subject in 2008. He published the below graphic:

Interestingly, other researchers reportedly conducted a poll in Fall 2021 with 956 participants to see their reporting. Here is their results:

So, what do you mean when you say something will probably happen?