Metrics Mania and the Countless Counting Problem

mobkarma writes "Einstein once said, 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.' A New York Times article suggests that unless we know how things are counted, we don't know if it's wise to count on the numbers. The problem isn't with statistical tests themselves, but with what we do before and after we run them. If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count."

Comments

Re:Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, my job is actually to get other, more important workers back to work asap.

A refreshing point of view. A surprising amount of IT weenies seem think that what they do is the most important thing in the entire company, and that the rest of the organization needs to bow down to their whims.

I remember having to explain to an IT worker that if they weren't going to change the schedule of the forced anti-virus full scan from 10:30am, I was going to delete the software since it was keeping me from doing my job. He didn't seem to understand that, no matter what he thought, having almost every machine be unusable for three hours in the middle of the work day cost a lot of productive time. His rationale was that doing it in the middle of the morning was the only way to be sure the machines were likely to be on since the machines might hibernate over night.

When 15 people started sitting in the lunch room for an hour or so, HR eventually managed to explain it to him that it wasn't really OK to cause all of the machines to lock up and become unusable in the middle of the day.