A while back I got into thinking through allocation problems that we'd typically use numbers for without using numbers. Things like "how much what do you need t

A while back I got into thinking through allocation problems that we'd typically use numbers for without using numbers. Things like "how much what do you need to store in order to get a village of N people through winter given the following consumption pattern ..." . When you decide not to use numbers for the problem, you end up writing algorithms. Every person gets a bucket ... a ration is allocated to each bucket round-robin, and so on. You end up writing logic and proofs for why your algorithm has to terminate at the expected conclusion. That may sound fancy, but its just what you end up doing as a regular person, without even trying to be fancy. It is somehow inherent it what happens when you avoid numbers. Your sort of just build everything you need out of analogs. It makes me think that if we were not indocrinated into numbers from an early age, we'd end up inventing them as an abstraction to the sort of thing you have to do when you're trying to avoid numbers. Another one I suggest trying is expressing and exploring linear regression without reference to probability theory.