Probability ranges are a cop-out with 90–93% probability

It feels like this post on LessWrong should mostly be preaching to the choir, but I have seen enough rationalists post probability ranges (mainly elsewhere) that maybe it is worth writing.

The probability of an event is not an objective fact about the world; it is a fact about your subjective uncertainty of it.

Hence, if you're not sure what the probability of something is, this is not because the world has some secret information that you don't have access to (the fact that you're estimating the probability in the first place is because of that), but because you just can't be bothered to put together all the relevant info you have and properly estimate and/or calculate the probability based on it. In a sense, not knowing what you need to take into account or how to do the math are just factors that add uncertainty to your world model, not something that stops you from estimating precise probabilities. If you really don't have any info whatsoever, such as if you have to estimate the probability of an event that is described to you in a language you don't speak so you don't even know what you're estimating, the probability is simply 50%, and any additional info you gain lets you update from there. You are allowed (and required) to do these updates based on a gut feel if you don't know how to do them "properly", and every time you do update, you still end up with a precise value, not a range.

There are some cases where posting a probability range is sensible for the purposes of communication. For example, if your probability of something is partially based on vibes and the vibes change daily for no apparent reason, maybe it makes sense to give your p(the thing) as a range from the lowest to the highest probability you've recently had, or if p(the thing) depends highly on some other thing, you might want to give your p(the thing) as a range from p(the thing | the other thing) to p(the thing | !the other thing) or vice versa. In these cases, it is usually helpful to explain why you're giving multiple probabilities, what they're based on, and how you then arrive from them to your actual probability, if you have the opportunity to. You could also give a probability range, especially in a highly public situation, because you want to seem like a reasonable and sane person both to the people who agree with your high end and the people who agree with your low end and don't want to reveal to either of those groups what you actually think. However, I strongly suspect that usually when people do post probability ranges, it is not because they're being strategic about communication but because they're being lazy about probability. Don't be lazy about probability if it's the probability of something that matters!