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VAuroch comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong
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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.
Yes, that's the whole point. There aren't always numbers you can find, even when there are, finding them is nontrivial, and you often have to deal with the ambiguous situation or problem regardless.
What you said here is a vast oversimplification; if you have gotten to the point where you can find relevant numbers, you have already successfully navigated most of the ambiguity.
Is there still an inferential gap here? I thought I made my point clear about three comments ago, but this is clearly not as obvious a distinction as I expected it to be.
And that's where you are being misled by your insistence on "finding" numbers instead of "making" them.
It's pretty easy to construct estimates. The problem is that without good data these estimates will be too wide to the point of uselessness. But you can think, and find some data, and clean some existing data, and maybe narrow these estimates down a bit. Go back to 1. and repeat until you run out of data or the estimate is narrow enough to fit its purpose.
Ambiguity isn't some magical concept limited to the humanities. The whole of statistics is dedicated to dealing with ambiguity. In fact, my standard definition of statistics is "a toolbox of methods to deal with uncertainty".
I understand your point, I just think it's mistaken.