Here’s a better explanation that captures the intuition behind those responses: a middling probability doesn’t just come from balanced evidence, it also results from absence of evidence (because in the absence of evidence, we revert to our priors, which tend to be middling for events that aren’t dramatically outside the realm of what we consider possible). It’s not suspicious at all that there are millions of questions where we don’t have enough evidence to push us into certainty: understanding the world is hard and human knowledge is very incomplete. It would be suspicious if we couldn’t generate tons of questions with middling probabilities. Most of the examples in the post deal with complex systems that we can’t fully predict yet like the weather or the economy: we wouldn’t expect to be able to generate certainty about questions dealing with those systems.
Here’s a better explanation that captures the intuition behind those responses: a middling probability doesn’t just come from balanced evidence, it also results from absence of evidence (because in the absence of evidence, we revert to our priors, which tend to be middling for events that aren’t dramatically outside the realm of what we consider possible). It’s not suspicious at all that there are millions of questions where we don’t have enough evidence to push us into certainty: understanding the world is hard and human knowledge is very incomplete. It would be suspicious if we couldn’t generate tons of questions with middling probabilities. Most of the examples in the post deal with complex systems that we can’t fully predict yet like the weather or the economy: we wouldn’t expect to be able to generate certainty about questions dealing with those systems.