I'm sorry but what you provide above is not a proof. It's what passes for a "proof" in internet forums. At most it can give you some points in a reddit argument or similar pointless exchange (which I'm glad to note we're not having) but it's really not the same thing as a proof at all. Though I'm always hopeful that on HN users will be a bit more careful with the terminology. To clarify, when you said "proof" I expected a formal proof and I was curious to see if you had one in mind. And I was curious because it would have been very difficult to provide one, given that I didn't make any formal claims.

In any case, I don't even agree that my distinction between baking and cooking is so obviously wrong. If you search the internet for "baking" you will find pages upon pages of results with confectionary items, such as cookies, cakes, bread occasionally and so on- but not dishes like beef Wellignton or sheperd's pie, which are "baked" but not generally refered to as "bakes" or "baking" (not in UK English anyway- we might be disagreeing on the grounds of different interpretations of the same English words).

>> I am not you. And many people are not you. I presume that you learned how to cook as a kid from your parents? It means that you did receive quite precise instructions at one point until you learned how things work. And I bet that for any new recipe that you've never tried before you will look for and work with precise instructions.

Actualy, no, on both counts. I never received "precise instructions" as a child. I sure didn't learn to cook from my parents- like the curse of lycanthropy, the ability to cook a decent meal skipped a generation in my family. I learned to cook by watching my grandmothers and by eating the food they cooked. "Watching" did not include taking careful note of the precise quantities of ingredients used in a dish, just noting that certain ingredients are used (without restrictions on what varieties of those ingredients can be used, or what other ingredients may also be used). Later I used my memory of how a certain dish tasted to reproduce it. Occasionally I helped my grandmothers cook so I had some hands-on experience with specific types of processing of ingredients, which I find is much more troublesome for beginner cooks than knowing precise quantities.

For example, I used to help one of my grandmothers make spanakopita, a Greek spinach pie with filo pastry. That was when I was very small, before I even went to school, so too small to know anything about quantities like kilos etc, let alone remember them now. So I would only really help in the part where the filo pastry leaves are laid out in a tray, handlng them gingerly to avoid ripping them, then oiled with olive oil using a cooking brush (an easy job for a careful and methodical child's hands). Equally, when I wanted to make spanakopita for the first time as an adult I'd just use the memory of eating my yiayia's spanakopita to decide how much to use of spinach, leek, fresh onions and feta -the main ingredients of the filling, again from memory. I never looked up exactly how much e.g. spinach to use- first of all, the spinach I get from the supermarket comes in bags of 1kg and it's obvious that my (yes) baking tray would not take, say, 10kg of spinach.

As to new recipes I've never had before, my strategy is to look up some information about the dish on wikipedia, which never gives precise anything when it comes to dishes, and then see whether I can do something like that at home. Occasionally, yes, I've looked up recipes- but I've never followed one. I look up a recipe to get a feel for relative quantities, not precise, absolute values. But most of the time I don't even do that and use the proportions of ingredients that I feel I'll like.

In general, like I say above, eyballing quantities is part and parcel of knowing how to cook. I'm finding that this is hard to reconcile with some peoples' experience, but this really is the way most people cook- and the way that most people have, traditionally, cooked.

Edit: for the sake of having a honest debate, I confess that there are recipes that I've looked up, specifically recipes for emulsions like bechamel sauce, mayonnaise or a Greek sauce called avgolemono. Those require some precision (though not absolute) because, well, they're emulsions. But those are about 1% of my cooking. If I summarised my approach the other 99% of the time it would be thus: I reverse-engineer the recipes of dishes I've tasted and approximate those of the ones I haven't.