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johnlawrenceaspden comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong
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{ the ability to navigate ambiguity }
I think this is one of the most important skills you get from the humanities. I have a friend who's a history professor. He's very used to hearing 20 different accounts of the same event told by different people, most of whom are self-serving if not outright lying, and working out what must actually have gone on, which looks like a strength to me.
He has a skill I'd like to have, but don't, and he got it from studying history, (and playing academic politics).
How did he know that his judgment of what actually had gone on was correct? How did he verify his conclusion?
Statistics is precisely that, but with numbers.
That only works if you have numbers.
Luckily, you can make numbers.
"Making numbers" is unlikely to produce useful numbers.
Not necessarily.
Relevant Slate Star Codex post: “If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics”
"Making" is not "making up".
When you flip a coin a bunch of times and decide that it's fair, you've made numbers. There are no numbers in the coin itself, but you reasonably can state the probability of the coin coming up heads and even state your certainty in this estimate. These are numbers you made.
As a more general observation, in the Bayesian approach the prior represents information available to you before data arrives. The prior rarely starts as a number, but you must make it a number before you can proceed further.
No, those are numbers you found. The inherent tendency to produce numbers when tested in that way ("fairness/unfairness") was already a property of the coin; you found what numbers it produced, and used that information to derive useful information.
Making numbers, on the other hand, is almost always making numbers up. Sometimes processes where you make numbers up have useful side-effects
but that doesn't mean that making numbers is at all useful.
Basically, I think it's important to distinguish between finding numbers which encode information about the world, and making numbers from information you already have. Making numbers may be a necessary prerequisite for other useful processes, but it is not in itself useful, since it requires you to already have the information.
I don't think this is a useful distinction, but if you insist...
You said: "That only works if you have numbers." Then the answer is: "Luckily, you can find numbers."
Finding relevant numbers is significantly difficult in most circumstances.
That phrase is so general as to be pretty meaningless.
I do not subscribe to the notion that anything not expressible in math is worthless, but "in most circumstances" the inability to find any numbers is a strong indication that you don't understand the issue well.