I find it funny that you respond that way- so exacting (and how do you calculate past general round numbers? X7.6%? really!), and you also responded in terms of statistics as well, mind you (that is, you have given a confidence interval - and judging from your Samuel Clemmons quote, I'm thinking that you must think it immoral?).

I am teasing you of course. I often respond to my boss or other people that way when I can tell they are applying pressure for an answer (it means they are concerned and trying to balance schedule, costs, and risk). They are often just looking for an answer like, "I am certain," or, "I am positive," which, after all is said and done, leaves much to the imagination. If I give a vague answer like that, it means they are free to blame me when, in retrospect, they just simply "bet wrongly," and usually rediculously as well. However, if you give them an answer like "87.6%", first, they look at you like you are nuts. After all, what have you been doing? Spending all of the company's valuable resources trying to figure out the odds of your solution as opposed to WORKING the solution? And you're not even 100% sure? You must be a terrible engineer. We'll go find someone else who is 100% sure and knows what they are doing.

So, my standard answers now are more vague than that. I either reply 99.999% sure, or 50%. 99.999% meaning that I'm am sure it will work, but I also may have to continue to work solutions along the way. 50% means it is a crapshoot, and we haven't really found something reliable yet.

The thing is you get better at guesstimating this stuff the more you do it, and the more situations you find yourself in like it. Else, someone else does. So it is a bit of salesmanship. Sell yourself, or perish (after all, if you are not working these types of problems, then your skills are fading... they don't stay the same).

So, while I certainly see where you are going with this, and agree in theory with what you are saying, at the end of the day, I have to eat. And when my competitors are making outrageous claims, and winning jobs because the people supplying those jobs are too dense to make a calculation themselves to see the rediculousness they themselves are creating on the odds, or simply want to hold someone else reponsible for their own failings, then that tells me that incentives in the system itself must be fixed. And I'm sorry, I don't have more that a natural lifetime to spend waiting for that. My hunger cycles go in periods of 3 per 24 hours ideally. I can go longer, and have, but would really rather not.

Incidentally, there is a cartoon I find particularly funny involving redundant systems... It has a scientest telling his government contractor to "Halt! the launch of the rocket! We are only 50% sure that it will work due to a glitch in the design", to which the government program responds in the next cartoon by simply launching two rockets at $10 billion a piece.

There is much truth in this.