Sometimes researchers talk past each other because their intuitions disagree on underlying quantitative variables. Getting better estimates of these variables is action-guiding. This is an epistemological study to bring them to the surface, as well as discover which sources of evidence can inform our predictions, and which methodologies researchers can and do use to deal with them.

Work done during my last two weeks of SERI MATS 3.1. Thanks to Vivek Hebbar, Filip Sondej, Lawrence Chan and Joe Benton for related discussions.