On my model, the point of ass numbers isn’t to demand perfection of your gut (e.g., of the sort that would be needed to avoid multiple-stage fallacies when trying to conditionalize a lot), but to:
Communicate with more precision than English-language words like ‘likely’ or ‘unlikely’ allow. Even very vague or uncertain numbers will, at least some of the time, be a better guide than natural-language terms that weren’t designed to cover the space of probabilities (and that can vary somewhat in meaning from person to person).
At least very vaguely and roughly bring your intuitions into contact with reality, and with each other, so you can more readily notice things like ‘I’m miscalibrated’, ‘reality went differently than I expected’, ‘these two probabilities don’t make sense together’, etc.
It may still be a terrible idea to spend too much time generating ass numbers, since “real numbers” are not the native format human brains compute probability with, and spending a lot of time working in a non-native format may skew your reasoning.
(Maybe there’s some individual variation here?)
But they’re at least a good tool to use sometimes, for the sake of crisper communication, calibration practice (so you can generate non-awful future probabilities when you need to), etc.
On my model, the point of ass numbers isn’t to demand perfection of your gut (e.g., of the sort that would be needed to avoid multiple-stage fallacies when trying to conditionalize a lot), but to:
Communicate with more precision than English-language words like ‘likely’ or ‘unlikely’ allow. Even very vague or uncertain numbers will, at least some of the time, be a better guide than natural-language terms that weren’t designed to cover the space of probabilities (and that can vary somewhat in meaning from person to person).
At least very vaguely and roughly bring your intuitions into contact with reality, and with each other, so you can more readily notice things like ‘I’m miscalibrated’, ‘reality went differently than I expected’, ‘these two probabilities don’t make sense together’, etc.
It may still be a terrible idea to spend too much time generating ass numbers, since “real numbers” are not the native format human brains compute probability with, and spending a lot of time working in a non-native format may skew your reasoning.
(Maybe there’s some individual variation here?)
But they’re at least a good tool to use sometimes, for the sake of crisper communication, calibration practice (so you can generate non-awful future probabilities when you need to), etc.