I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard…
Also in addition 99 is interpreted in the brain very close to 100. That’s why we have prices like 99.99. Just an additional thing to your excellent reasoning about the 10x difference look.
Rather than guess at which percentage representation is more intuitive to people, the blog post suggests something more concrete:
instead of:
GitHub Actions: 98.31% uptime.
We say something like:
GitHub Actions: 12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime).
I’ve been presenting numbers to people for a long time and I know they flip back and forth between “these percentages are abstract - what’s the actual total number?” and “how do I put these totals in perspective? What percentage is it?” The blog post suggests offering both, which is the right choice.
More simply, replace uptime with downtime.
99% uptime and 99.9% uptime seem close.
1% downtime and 0.1% downtime is clearly a 10x difference.
Also in addition 99 is interpreted in the brain very close to 100. That’s why we have prices like 99.99. Just an additional thing to your excellent reasoning about the 10x difference look.
Rather than guess at which percentage representation is more intuitive to people, the blog post suggests something more concrete:
I’ve been presenting numbers to people for a long time and I know they flip back and forth between “these percentages are abstract - what’s the actual total number?” and “how do I put these totals in perspective? What percentage is it?” The blog post suggests offering both, which is the right choice.