Being judgmental is necessary for abstract thinking and deep understanding

Thinking how to communicate the idea that judgement is required for creativity....and how this forces a descriptive world and not a predictive ....

This makes me think that the general rule, follow the majority, as brought in the Torah is best represented by its context of judges.

So, if I have a bowl of fruit.  I can create descriptive features, such as size and color.  I can then measure these features in a bunch of fruit.  We will find that the fruit spread across this two dimensional space.  For example, apples and oranges are roughly the same size but their color is different.  Apples spread across many colors, green, red and yellow apples, while oranges are typically either orange or green.

Based on these first order descriptions, i.e. statistics directly applied to the features measured, it will not be possible to differentiate between apples and oranges.

Now, I can add tangerines to the mix.  Tangerines share the color spectrum of oranges, yet they differ in size.  Again, based on the first order descriptors it will still not be possible to differentiate between oranges and apples.  In truth nothing changed in the relationship between oranges and apples.

However, if I look at the relationship between oranges and tangerines I will be able to differentiate between them based on the size.  That is a single dimensional difference.  In other words, oranges and tangerines are almost identical when it comes to color (one dimension) yet they are separable in another dimension (size).

Now comes the judgement statement, oranges are more similar to tangerines than they are to apples.  I am not arguing that this is completely true (and is it not completely true, a green orange is more similar to an apple in color and shape than to an orange tangerine).  Rather, that I am willing to take a stance and based on the relative first order descriptives make that judgement statement.

What I have created is an abstraction, call it citrus fruit.  Oranges and tangerines are both citrus fruit as opposed to apples.

Now comes the magic.  Given a fruit, first I ask: is the fruit a citrus fruit or not?  This question is asked in the first order descriptive space defined by the orange/tangerine shared relationship (color only), does the fruit's color make it more like a tangerine/orange or like an apple.  Since the color spectrum of oranges and tangerines is nearly identical even though the color/size spectrum of apples and oranges are more similar, I will conclude that the fruit is either a citrus fruit or not a citrus fruit.

Next, I ask the second order question, is the fruit an apple or an orange.  This now becomes an easy question to answer.  If it is a citrus fruit it is an orange.

It is interesting to note the process.  An abstraction requires three things.  Two are more similar to each than to a third.  All abstraction lose information.  Once we have an abstraction we can answer questions that were too difficult to answer before.