>I get that folks want to tame a chaotic world. But sometimes you can't.
No matter how little you know about something you want to estimate, there is an infinite difference between what you do know and knowing nothing. The right thing to do is to represent your knowledge without fabricating it.
Saying "I can't make a point estimate, therefore I can say nothing" is a false dichotomy.
Even if you say, x is between 0.001 and 10^10, you are narrowing things down.
There is a great paper mentioned periodically on HN, where they examined the famous Drake equation and show that when you get rid of point estimates and use reasonable ranges for each variable, the "paradox" that we don't see aliens vanishes. Despite many of the variables having uncertainty of many orders of magnitude.
No matter how little you know about something you want to estimate, there is an infinite difference between what you do know and knowing nothing. The right thing to do is to represent your knowledge without fabricating it.
Saying "I can't make a point estimate, therefore I can say nothing" is a false dichotomy.
Even if you say, x is between 0.001 and 10^10, you are narrowing things down.
There is a great paper mentioned periodically on HN, where they examined the famous Drake equation and show that when you get rid of point estimates and use reasonable ranges for each variable, the "paradox" that we don't see aliens vanishes. Despite many of the variables having uncertainty of many orders of magnitude.